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Windshields, face masks, plastic gloves and furniture.
Those are just a sample of some of the items making their way to Loraas Recycle.
Serving as a reminder on Earth Day, Loraas digital and educational specialist Alexa Mofazzali is telling people in Saskatoon what exactly should be going into the blue bin.
Paper, cardboard, plastics — with the recycling symbols 1 through 7 — tin/aluminum and glass can all be safely discarded in your blue bin, but there are some conditions.
“All of the items that come to us need to be clean food-grade items,” Mofazzali said. “So yes, a windshield is made of glass, but no, it does not belong in your cart.”
Finding items that should have gone in the trash isn’t new for people at Loraas, but more items have been appearing during the pandemic.
Mofazzali said a recent audit revealed an average of 8,100 masks and plastic gloves are being found at Saskatoon’s recycling facility daily.
“That’s a pretty conservative number. We could have gone as high as 10,000,” Mofazzali added.
Understanding some people might not be aware of what exactly belongs in the recycling bin, Mofazzali figures a combination of factors led to tens of thousands of items landing at the recycling facility.
“I think some people are really just trying to recycle everything that they can, and for some people, it could very well be a laziness or a bad habit, so it’s really my job to connect with people to get them to care,” she said.
Items must be clean before Loraas gets ahold of them, something Mofazzali said is a constant struggle.
“Quite often, manufacturers might not need material from us for several months. If you send us your milk jug with milk left in it and it goes sour, it’s going to contaminate that whole bale of recycling. We have to be really careful when we’re baling materials that they’re clean so that those bales don’t start to grow mold,” she said.
Some items not accepted by Loraas include styrofoam, plastic bottle caps and cardboard with combined materials like metal or soft plastics.
“It does get a little bit complex for the average recycler,” she said of the so-called “mixed material items.”
“If you can separate the materials into the cardboard, the metal, the plastic as three separate items, then we can recycle it. We don’t have time to pull apart hundreds of thousands of Pringle cans.”