Holiday trash

2020-12-20 16:21:21

Christmas time is the most wonderful time of year with mistletoe, little string lights, and presents galore under the tree but when the holiday’s over, there are lots of boxes, wrapping paper, bubble wrap laying around and it’s hard to know what’s waste and what’s recyclable.

So, what can you recycle and what do you need to put in the garbage can?

Wauwatosa Director of Public Works Dave Simpson says recycling can be pretty challenging around the holidays.

“We see an increase of plastic wrap and plastic bags end up in our recycling stream. That’s probably the number one thing that we see- that we can’t recycle in our single stream sorting facility that we haul our recyclables too. Keeping those plastic wraps and plastic bags out of your recycling stream is really important,” said Simpson.

Some of the things that you can’t recycle in recycling bins include plastic wrap, plastic bubbles, bubble wrap, wrapping paper, foam peanuts or packaging. They should go in the garbage.

And don’t even think about recycling those string Christmas lights.

“Christmas lights, in the industry, are called a “tangler.” So if people were to put Christmas lights in their (recycling) bin, that would cause a big problem in the facility,” Simpson explained.

Simpson suggests that if you have any questions about what goes in the trash or the recycling- to check out their “Waste Wizard” web tool- where you can type in an item and see if it should be thrown away, recycled, composted or reused.