Your curbside pickup (or apartment recycle drop-off), may only accept a fraction of your recyclable items. This article will help identify your recyclable items and take to the appropriate drop-off locations.
Did you know? Your curbside pickup can only accept 20% of your recyclable items. Most other items like crinkly flexible films, rigid plastics, Styrofoam you can only drop off to your local recyclers like Cincinnati Recycling & Reuse Hub.
Most of the curbside pickup companies only accept limited items. Following are the items accepted by our are recycling company Rumpke. Cincinnati area folks! For an up-to-date acceptable items, visit Rumpke's official acceptable items page.
Do not put any kind of flexible plastic films, in your curbside bin. This includes, grocery bag, zip-locks, frozen vegetables bags etc. They accept only very few rigid plastics in the tub form. None of the other rigid plastics like cookie trays, carryout-boxes.
Store drop-off refers to plastic bag recycling bins, that you will find at the entrance of your retail stores like Kroger, Target, Walmart, Meijer.
They accept flexible plastic films, numbered 2 and 4. Examples: Plastic Grocery bags (We suggest taking your reusable bag, so that you don't even have to recycle 😀), Amazon Mailers, Newspaper bag, bread / bagel bags, Clean Zip-lock bags (We wash and reuse multiple times), shipping air pillows.
Your local recycling centers like Cincinnati Recycling and Reuse Hub.
Here you can recycle your Store Drop-offs, Flexible Plastic Films not accepted by your store drop-off and other items like Styrofoam, denim, foot-ware, metal, to-go boxes, plastic planters, aluminum trays and more. Checkout some pictures, that I took.
There are 2 popular standards in US. The newer one is How2Recycle. Their labels are big, clear and easy. The other standard is the 1-7 Resin Codes
Most electronic recyclables, drop in places like Best Buy.
Reducing, Reusing are always better than recycling. Use re-usable grocery bags. Avoid use and throw stuff. Find and shop eco-friendly items, that are durable and repairable.