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Comment by emodendroket | Hacker News Reader

You're probably best off looking at the instructions from your town if you're in the US.

This is a pain point. Every different place I have lived, worked, and visited has had different recycling rules. Municipalities need to get their shit together and agree on a country-wide (or at least state-wide) standard. Otherwise people are not going to bother. I’ve got a limited number of things to think about in a day, and “is this particular kind of plastic recyclable in this city” is not going to be one of them.

I love this thinking, but it isn't clear how to incentivize the typical municipality. I live in a very typical 35,000 person city in middle(-ish) America. A $2.00/month charge was proposed to continue supporting weekly recycling. That didn't happen and recycling was cut to every-other-week because the cost was deemed too much of a burden on retirees (no joke, this was the argument). Then, as recycling shifted from being a revenue generator (because Chinese (?) recyclers were buying it) to a cost center, many other smaller towns in the area just caved in and stopped recycling altogether. Our city instead put in place a $3/month surcharge (oh the irony).

Likewise, we are in the heart of our state's wine country. Wine comes in glass bottles. Our city has never (?) had glass recycling because it was deemed not-cost-effective, as the nearest glass recycler is a four hour drive away.

Point is: it's the economic incentives/disincentives for municipalities, it's all they care about.

Can't you take glass bottles to the grocery store?

No. Some grocery stores accepts plastic bags for recycling, but none accept bottles or cans here. Eight miles away across the state line in Oregon they do, but the state has set up a system that requires Oregon ID in order to use the collection machines.

Second this. Whoever collects your trash (municipal or commercial) will likely have instructions posted for what is and isn't recyclable. If you can't find it, call or email them. It's almost guaranteed that someone will give you a good response, because some items like plastic bags will actively jam or clutter sorting machinery.

On that note, plastic bags from grocers (labeled carrier bags in the article) are almost never accepted by recycling centers for the above reason. However, there is likely a grocer nearby that will accept those bags for recycling. I think all Wal-Mart stores will accept these bags.

Our municipality will not accept plastic shopping bags because they say there is no market for them.

Some of the supermarkets do take them but I have to suspect that they just truck them to a landfill.

There's a sticker right on my recycle bin with instructions.

Many can recycle "2 HDPE" but few recycle "5 PP".

What about tetrapak boxes and milk boxes? Shirt bags from dry cleaning?

I believe (at least in the UK) that Tetrapak contribute to a recycling scheme (hence the Green Dot symbol - note it's NOT the regular recyclable symbol). With a bit of research I found a dedicated Tetrapak collection bin locally which we now take all our cartons to from time to time.

Things might be different where you are in the world.

They may collect it but Tetrapak is inherently barely recyclable - it contains plastic, paper and metal which can't be separated.

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