Cardboard is the most recyclable material we have. Plastic is complicated.

Better than recycling is to not consume in the first place.

Clean paper and cardboard are easily recyclable and worth money. I first figured this out over 30 years ago while taking commuter trains into NYC.

There were approximately one yard cubed wagons left on the platform to discard your already read newspapers for recycling. Local hustlers would often reassemble the papers and sell for half.

At some point locking tops eere put on so it was difficult to remove the papers. This was because the agency collecting the old newspaper was making money from it.

Fast forward. Some cities make it a crime to rummage through the recycling bins.

There is money there.

What you're posing as a counterpoint to potentially not being able to recycle paper products, we should automatically go straight to cutting down more trees.

Imagine making paper on your own property. You have two trees. You cut down one tree, plant a replacement, and make 100,000 sheers of paper product. When you're done with a sheet, throw it in your yard. It's composting, right? Sure. You've made no efforts to recycle clean paper. When your 100,000 sheets run out (printer paper, note paper, toilet paper, and paper towels), you have to go cut down the second tree. How big is that replacement tree? Is it going to ready 100,000 sheets later? Will it get struck by lightning, caught in a wildfire, hit by a car, or catch a disease? You'd hope not. So wouldn't it make more sense that, even though you're planning to replant trees, to recycle as much paper as you could? You wouldn't have a yard full of composting paper and you wouldn't have such a close dependency on your two tree plots. No, this isn't solved by having a whole forest available when you scale up the consumer side too.

Now consider that an average American consumes 7 trees per year and a tree takes at least 20 years to mature for processing. That's 140 trees growing simultaneously to support one person.

So no, we can't just blindly throw all our paper in a landfill and ignore the impact. Why so many places do single stream with tuna oil soaked into paper, I don't know. I get the frustration.

Metal isn't so clean either. Every time it gets processed, more and more is lost to oxidation and to contamination during smelting. Sure, it's more easily recovered from the single stream can, but I'm not a fan of metal newspapers

I don't know much but I've heard that landfills are so dense and thick that there is not enough oxygen to break down organic matter like did waste. I don't know for sure about that and I don't know how it applies to cardboard but that's what I've heard and read and seen videos about.

I hope someone with more knowledge could give a better informed comment.

RemindMe! 2 days

I think a lot of waste management is very local, so the answer might be different for you than it is for me.

In my town, there is a box factory that gobbles up all of our paper products and turns them into new boxes. So I know that putting the cardboard in my recycling bin is worthwhile.

If you can, paper and cardboard are compostable at home, help put that carbon back in the ground and grow more carbon scrubbing plants

Here's the hierarchy of recycling.

• aluminum cans, recycle at pretty much any cost. Recycling aluminum is so much cheaper than smelting new aluminum, companies will happily pay you for aluminum.
• corrugated cardboard, recycle if it didn't touch food, it's a bit overly restrictive, but contaminated cardboard causes lots of cardboard to be thrown away. Cardboard is super recyclable and profitable for companies. Ideally cardboard used with food goes to industrial composting.
• other paper products that are recyclable, it's generally down cycled, but still a pretty good deal.
• glass, only if it's perfectly clean or trivial to clean it. When in doubt toss it. Glass doesn't recycle well because it's more difficult to process into new glass, also color have their own chemicals that don't mix for recycling. Glass is better for a reuse target as recycling is at best breaking even economically.
• plastic, put it in the trash. Maybe if you are next to a recycling bin and the plastic is perfectly clean then recycle, but even then trash is probably better. Developed countries waste management systems will keep that plastic out of the water and it won't contaminate other materials.

Maybe part of the issue is the plastic bag that usually surround the biodegradable stuff?

There’s this idea that things will just “break down” in the garbage but in reality past a certain point in the landfill heap, there’s too little oxygen to fuel decomposition. And that point keeps rising…