Glad You Asked: Recyclemania

By Jill Decker

Where do you buy the clear plastic bags?

Last week’s Glad You Asked column detailed how to bundle shredded paper so that it will be recycled, but I didn’t think to say where the bags can be found. I did a little running around and found “shredder bags” at Office Depot (about $10 for 50), Staples (about $11 for 50) and Neff’s (about $33 for 100). Kevin Miller, Napa’s recycling coordinator, said some people use the clear plastic bags that large appliances sometimes come in, and Costco has some big plastic bags. He said they don’t have to be made of anything special, they just have to be see-through. He also said the bigger the bag, the more visible it is to the sorters, but in a pinch, clear fruit and vegetable bags from the grocery store would work. If you’re like me, you’ve got those suckers by the dozen floating around in your kitchen.

Miller said last week if you write “Shredded Paper” clearly and visibly in English and Spanish on an opaque bag that would be a good bet, too. I checked with a bilingual reporter here who said the best translation is “papel para reciclaje.”

Now you know everything you need to know to be Madre Earth’s best amigo.

I’m an avid recycler and have noticed we’re supposed to recycle narrow-neck bottles but no tubs made out of the same plastic material (margarine, yogurt, etc.). Why wouldn’t we be able to recycle the tubs?

A quick jog of my fingers through the yellow pages confirms that you can recycle plastic bottles of all colors as long as they’re rinsed and empty with the lids removed, but there’s a note that says: please no plastic bags, tubs, food/deli trays, plant trays or pots, irrigation pipe, small furniture, toys or any styrofoam.

Good thing I now have Kevin Miller, rajah of recycling, on my speed dial. He said “We accept all plastic bottles, but not all plastic.” The difference between the two is in how they are made, and it makes a difference in the recycling process.

Plastic goods are made either through an injection-mold process, where the items are stamped into shape from their blob of plastic, or a blow mold process, where the blob of plastic is blown into shape. The way the plastic item is formed changes its consistency, density, melting point and even gravity. These matter in the recycling process.

One way to tell if something is made by blow mold is to squeeze it. If you squeeze a two-liter bottle (like you might if it’s half empty and you want to eliminate some of the air in the bottle) it pops back into shape when you let go or when you coax the dent out of it. If you do the same thing to a yogurt container or a plastic flower pot, it will break. The two-liter is forged by blow mold process, the yogurt container is made by injection mold. So are deli trays. So are some cottage cheese tubs.

The bendability or shape “memory” are retained in the plastic after it’s recycled into a new product. Miller’s example was bender board, a strip of plastic about three inches tall that’s often used to line flower or garden beds and conforms to the shape of the lot or bed. If it was made out of injection-molded plastic it’d shatter or split when you bent it, and wouldn’t serve its purpose.

What is Glad You Asked?

Glad You Asked attempts to answer readers’ questions. So if you’ve got a question I’ll sort through the garbage to find the jewels of information that can be recycled into an answer that’s crystal clear. Send your question to me at jdecker@napanews.com or 256-2215.

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