Unsuspected recyclables: A neighborhood survey

You can hardly walk to a bus stop without brushing past big blue bins for papers, and wire cages for plastic bottles. The bins fill up quickly, too, showing that people are making the effort. In my home town, Petah Tikva, a few of the new orange bins that receive all kinds of packaging trash are starting to appear here and there. But Israel is still behind Europe in recycling its waste.

Although Israel leads the world in water purification and recycling, we still haven’t become efficient in recycling the immense amounts of garbage we generate. According to a study conducted in 2012 by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Israel was recycling only 18 percent of its garbage at the time. Sweden and Switzerland, in contrast, exploit the potential of almost all their waste by composting it or processing it to create energy.

Paper and plastic beverage bottles are easy to dump into their respective bins. Recycling cardboard boxes, glass, batteries and used packaging takes more effort, though, and hardly anyone composts. The blue paper bin in my building displays a big new sticker exhorting residents not to push cardboard boxes into it. People apparently figure that someone will take care of them, but cardboard undergoes a different recycling process and should be separated.

Although food trash could easily be composted to improve the soil in building gardens, home composting is still viewed as something cranks do. A sad example I heard came from friends who set up a compost bin in a nearby vacant lot. They went from floor to floor in their building, attempting to persuade neighbors to compost their food trash, but were met with stares and shrugs. It seems that even if it’s theoretically wonderful to separate trash, when it comes to keeping a pail for vegetable peelings in the kitchen plus a couple of bags for different-colored sidewalk bins, convenience wins over conscience.

To find out more about what steps Petah Tikva is taking in its current sustainability campaign, I browsed through the municipality’s website. I was glad to read that together with the orange bins on the sidewalks, residents will soon receive orange eco-bags where we can put recyclable packaging trash like tuna cans, milk cartons, snack wrappers and the ubiquitous plastic bags from the supermarket. Soon the days when we stuff everything into one household trash can will be gone. It will take some time until all of us automatically set different kinds of trash aside and then dump them in their appropriate bins. But we’ll get used to it.

In the meantime, consider the different kinds of worn-out or undesired objects that can be recycled. Here are some reminders.

Paper bins can receive not only newspapers, magazines, catalogues and phone books, but also junk mail and its envelopes, tissue boxes, the inner rolls of toilet paper and paper towels, unwaxed food packaging, shredded papers (in plastic bags to keep shreds from flying), sturdy paper bags like the ones from clothing stores, paperback books and hardbacks with the covers torn off. When clearing out my late father’s library, I recycled many old paperbacks. How about used paper coffee cups – minus plastic lids? They work, too. However, papers that have come into contact with body fluids – e.g., napkins and tissues – should not go into paper bins. Neither should wax paper, wrapping paper or used paper towels.

Many commercial centers have big cardboard recycling bins nearby. Take all your pizza and shoe boxes, corrugated cardboard, cereal boxes (minus waxed inner bag) and kitty litter boxes to those specific bins. Not acceptable: cardboard lined with plastic, or waxed (waterproof) cardboard.

Glass bottles with a redeemable deposit fee should be taken back to the supermarket. But if you don’t feel like it and don’t mind giving up the 30 agorot, drop them into the nearest purple glass-recycling bin. I admit, it makes me cringe to hear glass crashing as it hits the bottom – but my grandchildren love it, so I let them do it. All colored and white glass, like pickle jars and condiment bottles, may be recycled; rinse them out and remove their tops before dumping them in. Not acceptable are light bulbs, mirror and window glass, crystal, and ceramic objects.

Consulting with the municipality’s recycling department by phone, I learned that the wire bottle cages are for beverage bottles only. When the orange multi-trash bins become more common, we’ll be able to recycle milk jugs, deodorant containers, toothpaste tubes, soap and shampoo bottles, detergent jugs, clean grocery bags, plastic clam-shell take-out containers, and screw-top plastic jars like those for mayonnaise and ketchup. Styrofoam will not be acceptable.

Also, don’t forget to donate clean discarded clothes, handbags and knapsacks in usable condition. On my street, there’s a huge bin for clothing donations, right next to the bottle and paper bins.

Other kinds of trash take a little more to recycle. Separate containers for worn-out batteries should be attached to bottle cages, but aren’t always. It’s worth saving up your batteries to do one big trashing where you know there’s a container. The Petah Tikva Municipality’s phone representative informed me that there are three localities in the industrial zone where one can recycle CDs, electronics and all sorts of light bulbs. (It would be a good idea to wipe out all data on a hard drive you intend to dump.) Call 106 and go through the channels to find out where those kinds of objects may be recycled in your town (Hebrew only).

Another way to recycle electronics is by donating cellphones, computers, monitors, televisions and printers to a gemah – a local charity that specializes in fixing them up for the needy to use. Managers of these gemahim sometimes advertise on local email lists; otherwise, you can search on Google.

I conducted a small, informal recycling survey in my building via our WhatsApp group. The questions were: Do you recycle paper and cardboard? Plastic bottles, packaging? Batteries? Electronics? Glass? Of 23 families, six responded. All noted that they recycled papers, cardboard and plastic beverage bottles. Four families said they recycled batteries; one noted that they would, except that there was no recycling bin for them nearby (the nearest is one bus stop away, next to the grocery store). One family recycles electronics. Two families recycle glass by returning bottles to the supermarket. I would have added tires to the list, but to my knowledge, there’s nowhere to recycle tires locally.

It’s easy to see that where the municipality has made recycling easy – i.e., provided plenty of bins for paper, cardboard, and plastic bottles – people take the trouble to do so. There’s hope for more efficient recycling in our future.

Unsuspected recyclables: A neighborhood survey

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