The company responsible for sorting San Francisco’s discarded glass, paper and plastics can boil most of its recycling advice down to a three-word mantra: “clean, loose, dry.”
Recology mostly dealt with bottles, rags and newspapers when it started processing the city’s recycling more than a century ago.
Now, the vast majority of its business comes from cardboard, paper and bottle glass. But items that don’t fit neatly in those categories can create confusion: Employees routinely pull out soccer balls, clothing items and dumbbells. Such oddities can gum up the system, as in the case of a wig that got tangled in the machinery earlier this month…