An Important Message From The Orange Recycling Committee:
I look around and see black plastic in my house: leaf bags, cooking utensils, take-out food containers, plastic flower pots and trays. Maybe other stuff too. I bought the cooking utensils many, many years ago when I had Teflon-coated pots and pans.
Since I don’t any more, I have replaced these with wooden utensils for my seasoned cast irons pans.
Do you know that black plastic is bad? Due to its color it is basically not recyclable because the sorting machine cannot read numbers on the items. And worse, black plastic may contain toxic chemicals such a heavy metals and flame retardants in those food containers which could be hazardous to your health.
Black leaf bags are plastic also. And some people use black plastic sheeting in vegetable garden row walkways to keep weeds down. Here, mulch, whether wood chips or mulched leaves, will do the job just as well. Also consider using this mulch in
your flower gardens for the same effect. A friend of mine mulches all our leaves in the fall and we have 2 huge piles for our gardens.
What can we do with unrecyclable black plastic items? Firstly, don’t put them in your recycle bin! Check with your local nursery to see if they’ll take flower pots for reuse. (I called two Home Depots and sadly they don’t. They need to update their website!)
You should clean them thoroughly before donating them. Reuse black food containers for storage of food leftovers or other items. Take black plastic bags to the Town Transfer Station and put in the plastic bag container, not in the hopper, or to Kohl’s
Target, Lowe’s, ShopRite, Best Buy. Make sure they are clean.