Myth-BustingOctober 5, 2026
Aluminium foil is recyclable material — not an automatic blue-bin item
Cleanliness, item size and local sorting rules decide whether household foil has a real recovery route.
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Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
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Myth-Busting posts
Myth-BustingOctober 2, 2026
Paper bags are not automatically the lower-impact choice
Bag weight, reuse and disposal change lifecycle comparisons; litter is a separate impact, not a reason to ignore production.
Myth-BustingSeptember 26, 2026
Do landfill liners last forever? Why liners eventually fail
No. EPA's own landfill design guidance says liners will eventually degrade, tear or crack. Liners delay leachate contamination, but the waste outlasts the container.
Myth-BustingSeptember 23, 2026
Myth: if you drop off e-waste at a recycler, it gets recycled
A Basel Action Network investigation found eight of ten U.S. firms shipping e-waste to Southeast Asia held R2v3 'responsible recycling' certification. Here is where drop-off electronics can really end up.
Myth-BustingSeptember 20, 2026
Your Receipts Do Not Belong in the Paper Recycling
Thermal receipt paper carries a bisphenol coating. Put it in the paper stream and the chemistry ends up in recycled paper products.
Myth-BustingSeptember 17, 2026
Shredded Paper Is Paper. That Does Not Make It Recyclable
Most recycling programmes reject loose shredded paper, and the reason is mechanical: the strips are the wrong size for the machines that sort paper.
Myth-BustingSeptember 14, 2026
"It's Paper, So It's Recyclable": What Actually Happens to a Coffee Cup
A hot-drink cup is about 95% paperboard. The other 5% is a polyethylene liner, and that 5% is why most mills reject the cup outright — even when you put it in the right bin.
Myth-BustingSeptember 11, 2026
"Compostable" Is a Facility Spec, Not a Property of the Object
Certified compostable packaging is engineered to break down in a hot industrial windrow. Put it in a garden bin, a recycling bin or a landfill and it behaves like ordinary plastic — because in those conditions, it is.
Myth-BustingSeptember 8, 2026
"Infinitely recyclable" is a property of glass, not a description of what happens to it
Glass really can be melted and remade forever without losing quality. About a third of it in the US actually is. The gap between those two sentences is the entire story.
Myth-BustingSeptember 7, 2026
"30% Recycled Content" Under Mass Balance Might Mean None in Your Bottle
Mass balance accounting lets a producer allocate recycled input to selected outputs. The molecules are real somewhere in the plant. They are not necessarily in the product carrying the label.
Myth-BustingSeptember 5, 2026
"Waste-to-Energy Is Clean Renewable Power" — No, and the Reason Is Arithmetic
Burning municipal waste for electricity emits more CO2 per unit of power than a coal plant. The climate case for incineration rests entirely on what the waste would have done instead, not on the electricity.
Myth-BustingSeptember 2, 2026
"It's just food — it rots away harmlessly in a landfill"
Food is a quarter of what goes into landfills and is linked to well over half the methane that escapes them. The reason is that a landfill is not a compost heap — it is the opposite of one.
Myth-BustingAugust 27, 2026
"When in doubt, put it in the recycling — they'll sort it out"
The EPA's guidance is the exact opposite sentence. One in four items in the bin is contamination, it costs the system $300 million a year, and the doubtful item does not get rescued by the machine.
Myth-BustingAugust 24, 2026
"Treated wastewater is automatically safe to drink"
"Treated" describes a process, not a permitted end use. Between sewage effluent and drinking water sit three distinct categories, each with its own treatment train, monitoring regime and regulator.
Myth-BustingAugust 23, 2026
Donated clothes are not guaranteed to be worn again
A donation bin is a sorting decision, not a disposal guarantee. Wearable, repairable, rag-grade and unusable all go different places — and the condition of what you put in decides which.
Myth-BustingAugust 22, 2026
Old tyres do not quietly biodegrade once they are buried
A worn tyre is engineered to resist heat, water, ozone and microbes for a decade on a vehicle. Burying it does not switch that off — it turns three durability features into three disposal problems.
Myth-BustingAugust 21, 2026
"Biodegradable" does not mean it disappears in a landfill
The word sounds like a disposal instruction. It is not. Whether anything degrades depends on the bin it lands in — and the US regulator's benchmark for an unqualified claim is a full year, in the route the product actually takes.
Myth-BustingAugust 20, 2026
“Flush unused medicines — the sewage works removes them anyway”
Conventional wastewater plants were built to remove suspended solids and biodegradable organic matter. Pharmaceutical compounds were never part of the design brief. The FDA's flush list exists precisely because flushing is the exception, not the default.
Myth-BustingAugust 19, 2026
"If it is plastic, put it in the recycling bin"
Bags, wraps and mailers are plastic, carry resin codes, and look recyclable. They are also one of the most reliable ways to shut down a sorting line.
Myth-BustingAugust 18, 2026
"Recycling is always better than reuse"
Recycling has become the default green answer, which quietly skips two better options sitting above it. The waste hierarchy is not a slogan — it is a ranking, and it puts reuse first for a specific reason.
Myth-BustingAugust 17, 2026
Paper cannot be recycled forever
Paper is one of recycling's genuine success stories — 68.2% recovery, the largest modelled share of MSW greenhouse-gas reduction. It is also finite at the fibre level. The loop is a cascade, not a circle.
Myth-BustingAugust 16, 2026
All glass is not interchangeable in the recycling bin
A tumbler and a jam jar look like the same material. To a container-glass furnace they are not. Here is why household glass collection is built around bottles and jars specifically — and what to do with everything else.
Myth-BustingAugust 15, 2026
"Flushable" on the packet does not mean flushable in the sewer
Toilet paper broke apart in eight seconds in a utility disintegration test. A wipe labelled flushable had not begun to break up after thirty minutes. EPA's guidance is unchanged: flush only toilet paper.
Myth-BustingAugust 14, 2026
Recycling does not always use more energy than making something new
Collection trucks and sorting lines are visibly energy-hungry, which makes the myth feel obvious. EPA's own numbers say otherwise for most materials — but the word doing the damage in the myth is "always", and it cuts both ways.
Myth-BustingAugust 13, 2026
A greasy pizza box does not automatically belong in the trash
Grease alone is not a disqualifier for a pizza box — EPA says recycle it. Loose food, liners and your local programme's rules are the parts that actually decide.
Myth-BustingAugust 12, 2026
No, plastic cannot be recycled forever
Metals and glass survive remelting largely intact. Polymers do not. Every mechanical loop shortens chains, and the recycling symbol says nothing about how many loops a package will realistically get.
Myth-BustingAugust 11, 2026
No, the recycling facility does not wash your containers
A sorting facility separates materials. It does not run a dishwasher. Here is what "empty and rinsed" actually means, why food-soiled items cause real damage, and where over-cleaning becomes its own problem.
Myth-BustingAugust 10, 2026
No, burning trash for electricity does not make recycling pointless
Energy recovery has a legitimate place in a waste system. It sits below prevention, reuse, recycling and composting - and roughly a tenth of what goes in still comes out as ash bound for landfill.
Myth-BustingAugust 7, 2026
A dead lithium-ion battery is not safe in the trash or the blue bin
A battery that no longer powers your device still holds enough energy to start a fire when it is crushed in a collection truck or a sorting line. The recycling symbol on it does not mean curbside.
Myth-BustingAugust 6, 2026
"A landfill is just a hole in the ground"
A regulated municipal solid-waste landfill is an engineered containment system with liners, leachate capture, gas wells and decades of post-closure obligation. That is also not the same as saying it is safe forever.
Myth-BustingAugust 5, 2026
The triangle with a number does not mean "put me in the blue bin"
The chasing arrows around a 1, 2 or 5 identify the resin. They say nothing about whether your hauler collects it, whether the sorter can capture it, or whether anyone will buy it.
Myth-BustingAugust 5, 2026
"Compostable" does not mean backyard-compostable
A compostable label describes how a product behaves under specified industrial conditions. It is not a promise that your compost heap, or your recycling bin, can handle it.
Myth-BustingAugust 1, 2026
Is Turning Plastic Into Hydrogen Actually Recycling?
The chemistry is real. The label is doing a lot of work. If the outputs are hydrogen gas and mineral carbonate, no plastic has been recycled — something else has happened.
Myth-BustingJuly 31, 2026
Recycling Everything Is Not Automatically More Circular Than Reuse
China's second-life battery decision is being read as a win for the circular economy. Shredding a working battery to recover its metals is the opposite of the waste hierarchy.