Should I Remove Lids From Bottles and Jars Before Recycling?

Glass jars or bottles may have either plastic or glass lids on them, which may lead to some confusion when throwing these into your recycling bin. Should they be removed? Are they, themselves, recyclable? Will leaving them on contaminate the whole load of recycling?

At the Recycling Works facility in Elkhart, Indiana, their state-of-the-art facility is well-equipped to handle these questions....and these commodities. Recycling Works employs the help of such a sophisticated sorting machine that the lids on glass containers do not have to be removed before placing the containers into regular recycling.

As with glass jars and bottles in most recycling centers, they end up broken in the recycling process. The machine at Recycling Works has a station with a magnetic belt that attracts metals, ultimately keeping them out of the wrong kind of recyclable stream. That is, if the lid is a magnetized metal. If the lid is made of some type of plastic, it is handled through different means.

Ultimately, you are welcome to leave lids on the glass jars and bottles that you place into your single stream recycling. The updated, state-of-the-art recycling processes currently in place will more than handle the mixed commodities at the processing level.

For more information on recyclable items visit www.wasteawaygroup.com.