Plastic Recycling: How our past always catches up with us

Some things work like a dream. Your household blue recycling cart, for example, —you put your recyclables in it, wheel it to the curb, and it gets picked up weekly. That routine translated into 6,365 tons of material recycled in Berkeley last year. Each Berkeley resident did their part to divert 6,365 tons of cardboard/paper, aluminum, glass, and some plastic from going to landfill.

Household recycling is one of the most accessible and widespread ways to conserve natural resources. This includes not only avoiding pulling more virgin resources from the earth, but it also conserves energy and water, and avoids carbon emissions, all of which would have been expended to extract those virgin resources for practical uses.

Plastic recycling, however, disrupts the dream. Unlike aluminum or cardboard, you can’t just throw all of your used plastic in your blue recycling bin and be confident that it’s recyclable, no matter what the chasing arrow symbol indicates. That’s why one community member asked, “Which of the types of plastics that I put in my blue bin, are actually recycled? “

The simple answer for Berkeley residents is that narrow-necked plastic bottles and jugs marked with chasing arrows no. 1 and no. 2 are currently recycled. Plastic no. 1 is polyethylene terephthalate (PET or PETE), and plastic no. 2 is high-density polyethylene (HDPE). All the other types of plastics are landfilled, except compostable plastic which you can put in your green bin and is composted. This means that for Berkeley residents, plastic no. 3 through no. 7, as well as plastic film such as plastic bags, are sent to landfill and are not recycled.

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