In my experience, small offices everywhere are emptying the receptacles of their crosscut paper shredders into the plastic bags provided by the shredder vendors and placing those into recycling bins. The trouble is, almost no recycler takes them. I couldn’t find anyone who did other than San Francisco, the Elizabeth Regina of municipal recycling.

The problem is baling. Most recycling is baled and sold, and it’s hard to bale those tiny strands. SF gets around it by requiring shredded paper to be inside a sealed paper sack, basically pre-baled. If you don’t live in SF, you can use shredded paper in compost, as mulch, for hamster bedding, or to supplement kitty litter. Or can you? The ink content question is worth researching if you’re considering one of those options.

I have on occasion had the temerity to mention this to someone else, though I’m learning not to. People do not like to hear that anything can’t be recycled, especially large boluses of paper. I’ve experienced anger, disdain, incredulity, scorn, and outright laughter–obviously, I’m joking–followed by a quick change of subject.

I think, or rather I fear, that it’s very important for us to believe that our stuff is being recycled because at some level we know we are creating too much waste, but if it’s recycled, that’s ok, right? I say fear because I’m not proud of us, educated progressives most, for letting our emotions cloud our understanding. Recycling uses energy. Sorting relies on low-paid laborers doing icky work, especially at the end of the chain. Recycled goods are hard to sell. Do you buy the second-time-around paper towels?

Me neither. And yes, I should be using dish towels instead, and probably cloth napkins.

Reduce is hard–so much laundry!–and so is reuse. I am reusing about five Whole Foods olive containers, and I just don’t need any more, yet still I visit the olive bar. Santa Cruz recycling accepts those containers, but not the produce clamshells from Trader Joe’s, even though they are so cute. I’ve met frugal party hosters who wash and re-use plastic utensils and even plastic-coated paper cups, but can one really sanitize such things?

Hey everyone, go grab some microbial contamination!

Perhaps you’ve heard that China, last stop for most US and European recycling for twenty years, has stopped accepting plastics, unsorted paper, and textiles this year, leaving first-world countries scrambling to find replacement countries while cast-offs pile up. Chinese workers were doing activities such as reducing discarded textiles to threads, manually. This could change the recycling meme. If you have the stomach for it, there was a great article summing up the main issues in the Huffington Post last month:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/china-recycling-waste-ban_us_5a684285e4b0dc592a0dd7b9

In response, EU and UK are moving to ban more plastics, ie, the Reduce option. The US federal government is not doing that.