![]() ![]() “I remember starting with my kitchen, then my bathroom, and then suddenly it becomes your lifestyle.” “Having a reduce and reuse mindset may be challenging at first, but it develops a snowball effect once you stick with it,” said Sydney Trimble, NRES senior and F&S Waste Management Intern. Secondly, you can reuse plastic grocery bags at home. Firstly (and preferably!), you can opt not to use plastic grocery bags at all and instead bring a reusable bag to the store. “The rule of thumb is if you can puncture your thumb through the bag, it’s recyclable in the plastic drop-off, but absolutely not in the normal recycling stream,” Moore said.īut there are two better options. This includes all soft plastics like Ziplocs (with the press-seal top cut off), bread and cereal bags, and stretchy plastic wraps (e.g., the material around paper towels or drink bottles). On campus, plastic grocery bags are only accepted in a few designated locations: at the Illini Union, the Illini Union Bookstore, Lincoln Avenue Residence Hall, Garage and Car Pool Building, and Wohlers Hall. Instead, some grocery stores offer plastic bag drop-off, wherein they go to a specialized recycling stream. When these soft plastics enter recycling streams intended for cardboard or plastic bottles, they jam and break the machinery. Plastic bags should never be placed in regular recycling bins, and you should never bag your other recyclables in plastic bags. “Anything smaller than a business card should just get thrown away.” “Small items often cause more harm than good,” said Meredith Moore, iSEE’s Sustainability Programs Manager. The plastic cap to a single-use water bottle, therefore, should be left on the bottle or thrown away separately. Anything smaller than a credit card runs the risk of jamming machines or simply getting lost in transport. Regardless of the plastic number, very small pieces of plastic should never be recycled. ![]() The cities of Urbana and Champaign, on the other hand, recycle all types of plastic, 1 through 7. These plastics can be broadly referred to as “beverage containers”: 20-ounce water or soda bottles, 2-liter bottles, milk jugs, and peanut butter jars. On the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus, only plastics 1 and 2 are collected for recycling. There are seven types of plastic, grouped by their composition and density, explained in this diagram from the City of Champaign recycling webpage. To streamline the recycling process, acquaint yourself with your local recycling rules. Some accept glass, others don’t some accept all plastic, others only specific types of plastic. Though recycling is not a perfect process, there’s a lot you can do to make it as efficient as possible.Įvery municipality has different recycling rules. Still, this bleak stat does not diminish the importance of recycling (along with reducing and reusing as well) - so long as it’s done correctly. Indeed, less than 10 percent of plastic is recycled each year, due to a combination of factors: Plastic degrades so it cannot be recycled infinitely, lots of plastic is never sent to recycling centers in the first place, sometimes it’s more expensive to recycle than to landfill, and myriad other reasons. In September 2020, one NPR headline had all the environmentalists talking: “ How Big Oil Misled The Public Into Believing Plastic Would Be Recycled. Lectures, Seminars, Symposia, & Colloquia.Illinois Regenerative Agriculture Initiative.Illinois sesquicentennial feature stories. ![]()
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