I've been there. I'm holding some packaging that kind of looks like it ought to be recyclable but isn't one of the standard products that are asked for. I could put it in the bin and then it'll head straight to landfill, or I could put it in the recycling and then it has a chance of being recycled, right? So it often seems better to recycle it in the hope that it might be recovered rather than consign it to certain landfill. This is known as wishcycling.
Sadly, from all that I've read about wishcycling it's not the best approach. When we put in non-recyclables into a recycling bin it contaminates the high quality recyclable materials and several things can happen:
So the advice I have learned to take on board is:
Counterintuitively, if we want to recycle more, it seems at the moment we have to recycle less.
And even better is to reduce and reuse where possible in the first place.
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