What you can and can’t recycle this holiday season

SALISBURY — Whether you’re celebrating Thanksgiving, Friendsgiving, Hanukkah, Christmas, Kwanzaa or the new year, the excesses of the holiday season come with an excess of waste. 

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, U.S. household waste increases by more than 25% between Thanksgiving and New Year’s Day. That’s a lot of trash cans filled with wrapping paper, bows, ribbons, shopping bags, packaging and food waste — all of which adds an extra 1 million tons a week to landfills.

Fortunately, knowing what the transfer station accepts for recycling makes a difference to the environment and revenue for our towns. 

Here’s a rundown on how you can correctly dispose of your trash and recycling through the Thanksgiving holiday.

Look for another story focusing on holiday gift packaging, entertainment items and year-round decluttering items in a December issue of The Lakeville Journal. 

Plastic bags

The holidays bring lots of plastic bags and product wrap — from the shopping bags you use to carry home gifts and food, to the plastic wrapping around a case of paper towels for your party.

“Plastic bags are the No. 1 contaminant” of recycled goods, said Brian Bartram, manager of the Salisbury/Sharon Transfer Station. 

The thin bags jam up the machinery at the facility in Hartford, Conn., that separates our recycling, he explained. If you take plastic bags to the transfer station, they should go in the garbage hopper, not the single-stream recycling bin.

“But there is a way to recycle them,” Bartram said. “You take them back to the grocery store, where they accept bags.”

Some area grocery stores participate in the Wrap Action Recycling Program (WRAP). Shari Jackson, director of the American Chemistry Council’s Flexible Film Recycling Group that runs WRAP, explained the type of plastic that is accepted. 

“Plastic bags, wraps and film packaging collected through store drop-off recycling are made from polyethylene, which is #2 or #4,” Jackson said. “Not all plastic bags, wraps or film packaging have a number on them. So a good way to tell if it can be recycled is to stretch it. If it’s stretchy, it can be recycled at store drop-off. If it’s crinkly or tears like paper, it can’t be recycled through this system.”

Visit WRAP’s website at www.PlasticFilmRecycling.org to find out if your grocery store has a collection bin and to see examples of what is accepted. Items collected include bread bags, zip-top food storage bags, product wrap from cases of bottled water and more.

Plastic bottle caps

From soda bottles and water jugs to food cartons and prescription pill bottles, the holidays bring a lot of small plastic caps. If a small piece of plastic is floating along by itself on the assembly line at the Hartford facility, explained Bartram, then it is small enough to fall through the screens and contaminate other materials below it.

For this reason, any plastic that is smaller than about 2-by-2 inches goes in the garbage hopper — unless it can be firmly attached to its container, such as with a plastic bottle cap. Then the whole container and cap go into single stream/mixed recycling. 

Entertainment platters

If you’re buying premade party fixings, then you’ll be excited to learn that the transfer station now accepts black plastic. Both the base and the clear plastic lid go in single stream/mixed recycling. The same is true for grocery hot bar containers. Everything you put into single stream/mixed recycling should be empty, rinsed clean and dry.

Tetra Pak cartons

If you’re using broth, wine, dairy milk, nut milks, soup and juice, then it might come in a carton called a Tetra Pak. It’s usually labeled somewhere on the carton. These go in single stream/mixed recycling. Make sure that the plastic cap is firmly attached.