Recycling plastic bottles : I understand why they have to be crushed, why do they have to have their lids off

The bottles are made of Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) and the lids of High Density Polyethylene (HDPE) which is much higher density and therefore a lot harder to recycle.

It would simply be too much manual labour (I suspect) to sort out the HDPE and recycle this separately.

It is not just a case of different plastics in the lid and bottle. Heres an experiment for you:

put the lid on the empty bottle and then try to crush it.

The bottles are usually designed to take around 200 pounds per square inch pressure on them especially if they are to hold fizzy drinks. If you leave the lids on the bottles, they can't be crushed and take up too much space. I asked about this when I talked to our local waste managment officer, and this was the reason given.

I know YOU have the common sense to crush the bottles before you put them in the recycling, but we have to remember that all advice has to be recieved by all people, and those who are not that genned up need to be told to leave the lids off. Otherwise there will be problems as the recycling trucks try to collect the plastics and find they can't get the volume of plastic needed to make the run economically viable, simply because the darned things can't be squashed with the lids on.

The lids ARE recyclable, just toss them in with the bottles, the recycling centre will have people to sort them from the rest. Your local council should have advice as to what kinds of plastic they recycle. Ours takes most bottles and containers, but not yoghurt pots or margerine tubs.

If they do not take the lids, there are various charities that collect bottle tops to raise money for good causes.

I am a member of Friends of the Earth Bracknell and we talk a lot of rubbish with the Council. I'm getting quite knowledgable about waste management. They want to introduce MRF, which stands for Mechanical Recycling Facility, and are hoping to instruct residents to just toss all their recycling into one bin. We are against this comingled waste because it means that about 20% of the recycling could get contaminated and end up in landfill. Still, at least they are trying to make it easier for people to do their bit I suppose.

It's because the lids are made of a different type of plastic which cant be recycled. plastic bottles are recycled by chopping them up into little bits, melting them down and making something new. but the type of plastic that the lids are made of do not melt and reform and if they get in amongst the other plastic it'll weaken the new plastic that is formed and cause problems.

I know someone who used to work at a recycling plant and they said some bottles do get through with lids on and it's like fireworks without the sparkles...it can be quite dangerous and he has been hit by a flying bottle lid...lol...ouch!

Always wondered about the same thing but keep getting different answers dont know and cant understand why lids cant be recycled.

The lids are made of a different type of plastic and ARE recyclable, our local recycling centre has recently installed an extra new collection point for bottle caps and yoghourt pots - hurray!

I neither crush them or separate the caps. I just toss them all into the recycling bin and people come once a week and take it all away. The tops usually are separate, since I took them off to use what ever was in the bottle, so I toss them in separately. But the lock rings are still on the bottle.

Once the bottles and plastics have pressure exerted on them as they are crushed, the bottles with lids dont crush down and can almost cause a pressure explosion. You can through the lids in seperately though

I am pretty sure that the bottles are a thermo-plastic, and the lids are thermo-setting, so this makes for seperation in re-cycling, thanks to their manufacture.

Fundamentally, they are two different types of plastic, which if just melted together, the result would be a brittle and largely unusable lump.

I do re-cycle as much as is sensible, but having to remember that the cork and the wine bottle must be despatched into different slots !

My son lives just across the border in Herts. I am in Beds.

He has four different coloured baskets to seperate household waste.

They are all just emptied into the same truck.

I was ticked off for putting a sawn down apple tree branch in the green bin, as it "won't go through the shredder"

They rightly ask us to re-cycle, but it is a complete farce sometimes

Bob

Until recently my council told you not to put lids in the recycling bin, but now they tell you to put them in separately so they can be recycled.