Recycling companies discourage what they call wish-cycling. That’s when people err on the side of tossing a questionable item in the recycling bin, like a foil lid from a cup of yogurt or some other material that they hope is recyclable. Those items can gum up the works at a materials recovery facility, or MRF, causing costly delays or damage. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Wish-cycling”
The term that seems to be having growing usefulness these days is wish cycling.
Wish cycling?
All right, can I make some guesses?
Sure.
So not related to bicycles?
No.
Okay, related to recycling kind of?
Yes.
Is this where it’s like a chain of wishes where I grant your wish, you grant somebody else’s, and we just keep the…
Chain of wish granting going? Oh, that’s lovely. No, it’s not that. But that’s not the answer.
Watch it be something terrible. It’s not so good. This is when you’re standing in front of your recycling bin and you’ve got something that you’re not quite sure of. Maybe it’s a beverage cap or the tinfoil lid from a yogurt. And it doesn’t have the recycling triangle to tell you. Right. And you’re thinking, well, it probably can be recycled. But you just know if you get it wrong, there’s somebody back at the sorting center going, oh, when will they learn?
Yes, yes.
If you get it wrong, there are consequences, and it costs the recycling companies, and it just messes everything up.
It’s not a good thing to do.
It’s really, really counterproductive.
So is it better to go on the side of throwing it away and then on the side of recycling it, if you’re not sure?
That’s apparently what they’re saying in the recycling industry because all of your recyclables are processed at a materials recovery facility.
Which is called a MRF.
Giant piles of things and lots of conveyor belts.
Right, right.
But the thing is that no two MRFs are the same.
And so it really depends on your locality.
And apparently a recycler in Minnesota came up with the term wish cycling, which was when people just sort of make assumptions, and they shouldn’t, because it really gums up the machinery.
Or, you know, they turn things into a slurry, but if there’s all this bad stuff, you know, like a greasy pizza box.
Yeah, you want the whole pizza, but you can’t because it has food residue and you can’t get the residue out.
Or jars that haven’t been cleaned out.
Wish cycling.
I wish I could recycle it, but I can’t.
Right?
Yes, that is the way that we should think about it.
There’s more about language.
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