I’m a dedicated recycler. I fret when I see people throwing garbage in with soda cans and empty water bottles. I’ve even been known to rescue recyclables from the trash—at my house, for sure, but also in public places if I think nobody’s looking.
Granted, the success of recycling plastic is abysmal—the U.S. rate is roughly 7%—but in theory it can be done. So, I was delighted when I learned that Tucson, Arizona, where I live, was starting a pilot program to deal with hard-to-recycle plastics.
These aren’t the containers that we can recycle curbside, numbers 1, 2 and 5, or even the bags we can take to stores for recycling. Hard-to-recycle plastics are everything else: caps and lids, food packaging, straws, all those little pieces of plastic too small for machines to deal with and all those other numbers that curbside and stores don’t take…