Healthy and Green Living

Love peanut butter but hate cleaning out the jars? And the worst part is, you're wondering the whole time: Is this really necessary?

Great question. If the container held food, yes, you are supposed to rinse it. The Web sites of every municipality I visited ask that residents rinse containers before recycling because rinsing helps make the recycling process more efficient at the recycling plant. All impurities, including food scraps, must be separated from the glass, plastic, tin or aluminum to ensure a high quality material that will be used in a new product.

How to Rinse

When rinsing, don’t use hot water or soap. It’s not necessary and energy is required to manufacture soap and heat water. Just put a little cold water in the container, put the lid on and shake to loosen food particles from the walls of the container.

If the container held any sort of hazardous or toxic material, it must be cleaned prior to recycling. If it is a non-aerosol container, open it with wire cutters or scissors and air-dry outside. Wearing gloves, swab the inside of the container with rags or recycled paper towels before disposal. Dispose of the rags or paper towels after they have aired outside. Make sure to do this with adequate ventilation, outside if possible, and when appropriate, with a mask.

What happens if I forget to rinse something?

If you don’t rinse something out, the recycling plant should catch it, but again, by rinsing you’re helping the recycling process go smoother. In glass recycling, magnets, screens and vacuum systems separate out metals, labels, bits of plastic, and other impurities before the glass is crushed.

The tin recycling process is made up of a series of chemical and electrical steps which separate, purify, and recover the steel and tin.

In plastic recycling, after the material is granulated into flakes and before they are turned into plastic pellets, the plastic flakes go through a cleaning process.

When aluminum cans are recycled, their coatings and outside decorations are burned off, so any residual food scraps would be burned off then too.