Doing your bit for plastic recycling? Are you rinsing it?

Did you know this? That you must gently rinse containers before placing them in the recycle bin? If you didn’t, and if you haven’t been, then chances are that you may have been, however unwittingly, jeopardising the recycling efforts of not just your own household but, sadly, of your entire locality. Yeah, the fact is even as the plastic (and glass) bottles, cans and even the bags need not be sparkling clean, they need to be free of any visible residue — and of course garbage — before they can be recycled.

And yes, it is part of our — the consumer’s — responsibility to see that we’re not throwing away half-empty cans and jars of sauce and jelly into the recycle bin. No, we don’t need to wash the plastic bags — just ensure that they don’t have residual waste (crumbs, etc.) in them before tossing them in the recycle bin. Don’t use fresh tap water (you can block the sink when you’re doing the dishes and use it to later rinse the residue off the recyclables). You can actually do more to help the cause, like crushing metal cans and squeezing plastic bottles flat to make it easier for the collection and recycling facilities.

So what happens if we don’t rinse our recyclables? Thing is, if a substantial proportion of the total load — contents from ours, our neighbours’ and our communities’ recycle bins — that reaches the recycling facility contains food or other residual material, it risks being labelled as ‘contaminated’. A sorting process at the facility can still segregate (salvage) the load’s content that isn’t contaminated, but if it’s considerably contaminated, the facility will reject it. It may then end up in an incinerator or in a landfill — wasting the whole ‘recycling’ effort. The bad news is that the UAE has one of the highest waste generation rates of between 1.9kg and 2.5kg per person per day. The good news is, now that you and I are aware, we can change that.