One of my followers (that sounds weird to say) read an article about rinsing out recyclables and thought it was worth sharing. Here it is...
http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/02/clean-food-containers-recycling
The article points out that it could be more wasteful to clean/rinse recyclables than the benefit of recycling it. I use a couple guidelines in my house when it comes to rinsing. One is the smell factor. I don’t want to leave food in a container that will cause my recycling cart to stink. Most of the time I give soup cans, etc. a quick rinse. The other factor is the economic factor. I will use a spatula to get the last bit of pasta sauce out of a jar…it turns out to be enough sauce for a kids portion of pasta. There is a reason that restaurants use spatulas to get every ounce of product out of cans. It effects their bottom line.
Take a somewhat hypothetical pasta jar example. If a jar of sauce costs $2.50 and has 10 servings in the jar, if you don’t use a spatula you may only get 9 servings and you are wasting 10% of the product or $0.25 per jar. My family goes through about 4 jars a month. If I wasted 10% of every jar it adds up to $12 per year and that is just pasta sauce, it doesn’t count peanut butter, mayo, etc.
With all that said, I agree with the article on clean recyclables and I agree that it is a waste to scrub containers clean with water and paper towels. What are your thoughts on this?
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I was at GV library a few years ago for a kids event where the kids got to check out a big WM recycle truck. The truck driver told the group of us that we should rinse out containers in order to keep rats and other critters away from the recycling center ....
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