Greener Living
Can You Recycle That? The Ultimate Cheat Sheet to What Can Go in the Bin
Are pizza boxes okay? What about broken glass? Recycling do’s and don’ts vary but you can probably recycle more items than you thought.
Illustration: Joi Fulton for Bloomberg Green
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Here are some general rules of thumb for what you can and can’t recycle across the US.
In most urban and suburban areas, Americans are encouraged to put all their recyclables into a blue bin and leave it outside for pickup. This is called single-stream recycling. Some countries consider it primitive: In Japan citizens are trained to sort their own waste into dozens of categories. But in the US we recycle or compost only about 32% of all solid waste, so we try to keep it simple.