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Contamination

15/11/2018

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Originally published Oct 3/18 The Reminder. Flin Flon, Mb. Sponsored by North of 53 Consumers Coop.

The other day I emptied a very fishy bag. There were some empty minnow containers and a full one along with several bottles with drinks in them. Aside from the smell, the really bad thing was that all the recyclable paper went in the garbage because it was soaking wet and fishy.

Many other bags have bottles that are very drippy, or half full with the lid on. Often paper items in these bags have to be thrown out.

Leaving the lid on a container does not solve the problem as everything is pressed together in bales for shipment. Bottles usually burst in the baling process contaminating everything around them in the bale.

It is not uncommon to see puddles of laundry soap under a bale. Because of this, we regularly check laundry soap containers and drain them, which slows down our process. We do not catch all of them.

I think we need to get our slogan ‘Not, Drippy, Sticky or Gooey’ out there more.

So I was very glad to see the new advertising campaign from Recycle Everywhere. The ads say ‘Left over liquids turns blue bins in to garbage bins’ and ‘Contamination makes your recycling go to waste.’

There are other complications from recyclable items coming to us with food, drink, soap and other liquids inside of them. More solid things like yogurt and peanut butter also cause problems.

These things get into the conveyor and baler gumming them up. Liquids often drip on the floor causing it to become very slippery.

So please take a bit of time to drain liquids and clean out other containers so everything you send for recycling can be recycled. 
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    Deb Odegaard has been with the Flin Flon Community Recycling program since it began  in 1992.  She  became the Administrator in 2013.
    Deb writes a  column 'The Recycling Bin' in The Reminder, Flin Flon's newspaper. Past columns are posted here along with recycling stats  and anything else on her mind. 

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