Since I’ve been a Hamilton resident, Mercer County has had a curbside recycling program. When introduced in 1988, the program required residents to separate materials into yellow buckets for glass jars, plastic bottles and aluminum cans, and green buckets for cardboard and paper. In 2010, the program adopted a single-stream system, meaning that any accepted recyclable could go into either color container.
That was the last time I remember recycling becoming less confusing. Since then, I’ve generated a steady supply of questions about what’s recyclable and how. I’m usually the one who puts out the recycling every other week, and I’ve often plucked items from our buckets because I suspected that they were not actually recyclable. But those were hunches based on half-remembered readings, spread across more than a decade. After a McDonald’s visit spawned a particularly bewildering group of items (clear McDonald’s plastic cup, plastic straw, food-soiled cardboard chicken nugget and french fry containers, plastic forks, paper hamburger wrappers, napkins, large paper bag), I decided to find some answers, if possible.
Brianna Machado, senior recycling coordinator for the Mercer County Improvement Authority (MCIA), set me straight on several points, and I am passing along, recycling, one could say, that information to you.
Plastic water bottles are the most recycled form of plastic, yet approximately 70% of them still end up in landfills. States that charge nickel or dime deposits on plastic and aluminum containers have double the recycling rates of states that don’t, and the 10 states with deposit systems recycle 61% of all recycled plastic in the U.S. Efforts to introduce deposits in New Jersey have faced an uphill battle, with stiff resistance from beverage trade associations and, somewhat ironically, the Association of New Jersey Recyclers, which views a deposit system as a threat to curbside recycling programs. But several states have both deposits and curbside recycling, and unsurprisingly, their plastic recovery rates are among the highest in the nation.
This topic reminded me of the 1996 Seinfeld episode “The Bottle Deposit,” in which Kramer attempts to transport a truckload of bottles and cans across state lines for profit. Alas, deposits have rarely increased in the past 30 years, losing ground to inflation, and some states have made out-of-state bottle returns a criminal offense, resulting in fines or even jail time. So anyone considering similar adventures in environmental capitalism would be well-advised to abandon them.
I had a more modest concern: Should I leave the caps of water bottles on when putting them out for recycling, or remove them? In the past, I’d heard that leaving caps on made it difficult, expensive or even impossible to recycle bottles, yet leaving them off meant the proliferation of small plastic pieces that often slip through the cracks of recycling facilities, ending up as unrecycled garbage and endangering wildlife.
“The older advice that plastic bottles cannot be recycled with their caps on does not reflect advances in recycling technology,” Brianna told me. “New Jersey DEP’s guidance supports recycling plastic bottles with their caps attached.” So Mercer County residents should leave caps tightly screwed onto their plastic bottles for recycling. If you enjoy squeezing the air out of the bottle before replacing the cap, that’s OK, too.
I was curious: What are the biggest problem items that people should NOT put in their recycling buckets? Plastic bags, pizza boxes, Styrofoam and ceramics are a few of the top offenders. Plastic bags (even when they contain recyclable items) get tangled in recycling machinery, and oil and grease stains can contaminate not just the cardboard box, but an entire recycling load.
I also wondered whether it was worth rinsing out jars and containers at the sink, sometimes using nearly a gallon of water to clean out a gallon milk jug. Brianna informed me that “a quick rinse is generally sufficient […] and keeping lids on reduces the chance of any remaining residue leaking onto paper fibers. Grease and oils are the main concern.” Another piece sorted.
And what about those mysterious numbers on the bottoms of recyclable items, sometimes so tiny I need to take a picture with my phone and magnify them to make them out? (One suggestion for better recycling compliance: Make the numbers more visible.)
Mercer County’s curbside program recycles only #1, #2 and #5 items, the latter being a recent addition to the accepted items list. In addition to plastic bottle caps, #5 includes amber-colored medication bottles and many restaurant to-go containers.
The #1 category includes plastic water bottles and other items made from polyethylene terephthalate, often called “PET” for short. Sometimes another acronym is used, and when I saw “PETE” on the bottom of a Wawa sandwich container, it felt like a personal call to action from a piece of plastic determined to be reincarnated and used again.
Lithium batteries need to be recycled at special locations, with the positive and negative terminals taped, because they can leach toxic chemicals or start fires if not disposed of properly. But for years, I saved old alkaline batteries in a jar, ignoring advice from even the most dedicated environmentalists to simply throw them in the garbage. It’s not great to toss them in landfills, but their component materials aren’t particularly valuable, so opportunities to recycle them are few and far between. The Battery Network sells a prepaid shipping box to collect and recycle 20 to 25 pounds of batteries (dry-cell single-use, rechargeable or cell phone), at a fairly steep $80 cost, but Staples will recycle a batch (described to me on the phone by a sales associate as “a Ziploc bag size full”) of regular AA, AAA, C, D or 9V alkaline batteries for a small $2.99 fee.
When it comes to recycling, the devil is in the details. In the interest of empowering Hamilton Post readers to recycle with confidence, I attempted some off-the-cuff, easy-to-remember guides to recycling plastics and batteries, the least discordant of which were:
“Numbers 5, 2, 1? By the ton! Numbers 3, 4, 6? Hit the bricks!”
And:
“C and D and double A, $2.99’s a small price to pay!”
But it’s never quite that simple. A final accounting of the McDonald’s paraphernalia revealed only one recyclable item: the clear cup, made of plastic #5. Lids and straws are garbage, any food-soiled paper or cardboard is no good, and plastic utensils are never OK for recycling, even if they’re made of acceptable plastic, like #5. The small size and awkward shape of utensils, as with plastic straws and lids, make them a nonstarter for recycling facilities.
It’s tough to be a perfect recycler, but it doesn’t take much effort to improve a bit here or there. Hopefully this information inspires you to be a little more vigilant, but even if you’re an active opponent of recycling due to “recycling fatigue” or just general skepticism, there’s a way even you can actually enjoy reducing waste: Recycle this column!
Peter Dabbene’s website is www.peterdabbene.com, and his previous Hamilton Post columns can be read at www.centraljersey.media/papers/hamilton-post/. He will be a featured reader at Lawrenceville Library’s Poet’s Perspective event at 3 p.m. Sunday, January 10, 2027. His poetry/photo book, The Lotus Eater (and Other Poems), is available through Amazon.com for $20 (print) or $10 (ebook).
