According to the recycling guidelines published by the City of Charlotte, if you choose to recycle, if you recycle glass, you should rinse it out. If you recycle plastic spiral cans, you should rinse or wipe out remaining food. Strangely, there is no mention of cleaning plastic. I’m also no sure what a plastic spiral can is, but this page leads me to believe it’s like one of those cans you get pre-made biscuits and cinnamon rolls and things in. I don’t know, because we don’t get many of those.
Anyway, what I’m wondering is this: You don’t want to have a bunch of food in the recycle bin because it’s just nasty – keeping the food there is just asking for bugs in the best case and rodents in the worst case, so I’m thinking that it’s a good idea to clean them out. But with all the hubbub about the lack of rain, and how lakes are closing their access ramp and even wells are running dry, is it an issue that we are effectively wasting water to clean items to be recycled?
Obviously the whole point of recycling is to conserve. Aluminum is one of the most recyclable materials on the planet. It takes something like 5% of the energy to create a can from recycled material as it does from new material. That’s impressive. Obviously it doesn’t take much to rinse out a soft drink can, either, so that’s not really the question here.
But if you’ve just about finished off the peanut butter and you’re left with, well, whatever is left in the jar, and it’s going to take you a good bit of scrubbing and who knows how much water to get the rest out (not to mention clean up the mess you make), is the tradeoff worth making? Is that jar going to save enough by making it into the recycle bin to make the wasted water worth wasting? Does anyone know? Does anyone care?
I don’t know if I do. I’m probably more likely to throw it out just because I don’t want to scrub it out and clean up the mess. I’m just wondering if anyone has thought about it.