None of us likes to waste time or money, but that is exactly what happens when plastic bags find their way into your recycling bin. Plastic bags are one of the most pernicious, problematic materials for recycling facilities. They cannot be sorted mechanically and as a result they roll along the sorting lines getting tangled up in the screens, jamming the machinery and costing time and money to extract.
What to do instead? Considering most plastic bags are used for less than an hour, make an effort to remember your reusable bags when heading out for a shopping trip. If you do use plastic bags, rinse and reuse them when possible (this goes for anything plastic). Most importantly, place your recyclables directly into your cart, never put them in plastic bags.
Clean, dry and empty plastic bags, including plastic shopping and newspaper bags, zip lock bags, dry cleaner bags and bubble wrap, can be recycled at the Center for Hard to Recycle Materials (CHaRM), located at 6400 Arapahoe in Boulder.
