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Preparing Household Recycling
This describes methods of preparing household materials before the recycling truck gets to your house.
This may someday be a handbook, but for now it's just on the web and you can't order a copy. But you have my permission to print as many copies as you want from the web.
Why Prepare Materials for Recycling?
I guess it takes fuel to get your recycled stuff to the reprocessing place. And the processing place uses fuel to turn the stuff back into materials which can be recycled.
Any fuel we can save in that process is going to save a bit of greenhouse gas. Not a lot, so don't feel guilty if you don't do any of the steps mentioned here.
Squashing a soda pop can can reduce its volume from about 340 ml to about 50 ml, which is about an 85% reduction in volume.
I do a lot of this preparation because it also saves me some effort. Squashing things means I don't have to take out the recycle as often. Some weeks, when the weather's awful, the recycle truck doesn't have to stop at my house. That saves the truck time and energy, but it also means I don't have to shovel a space in the snow big enough to set the recycle box that week.
Note:
Some of the procedures involve cutting things. If you can't do this without cutting yourself, don't do the procedure!