Recycling 101: What to recycle, what not to recycle,and does it even matter?

Glass and plastics aren't worth much. They don't occupy much landfill space, and plastic causes the most trouble at MRFs. So don't sit up at night worrying about the glass or plastic you tossed into the regular garbage.

Local MRFs sell their grouped materials to buyers as far away as China. Different materials have different return pay rates per ton. Because glass is made out of sand, companies don't pay much for it. Plastic doesn't sell for remarkable rates, either.

Other metals get great return rates. That's why burglars have put their own twist on the eco trend — ripping copper out of old buildings and reselling it to for hundreds of dollars to scrap yards. Unless you want to be recycled through Arpaio's jail, though, you should refrain from this eco trend.

Cardboard boxes and newspapers are the two most recycled products in the U.S. — mostly because it makes financial sense to reprocess them.

The majority of cardboard boxes end their lives in an alley behind a store somewhere. It's easy to drive behind a strip mall and pick up all the boxes — clean and in one place — then sell them to a paper mill. There was never a government campaign to recycle boxes, but they're the most recycled product because they're easy to collect and are valuable to paper mills.

"The people who want paper will pay more for clean product that is sorted," Porter says of leftover boxes and newspapers. That may be why about 70 percent of newspapers now get recycled, too — usually into more newspapers, according to Chaz Miller of the National Solid Wastes Management Association.

Recycling paper saves significant landfill space, too. Archaeologist William L. Rathje spent decades digging through U.S. landfills to see what they're made of and how they biodegrade. In his excavation project with University of Arizona students, Rathje learned that paper occupies 40 percent to 50 percent of landfills.

Clean, grouped materials (piled cardboard boxes, a bag of aluminum cans or a dumpster of newspapers) can bypass the MRF sorting line altogether. Dropping your waste in large, one-product containers like these saves more energy and emissions than using curbside.

WHAT NOTTO RECYCLE

If you put plastic grocery bags, diapers, or shredded paper in the recycling bin, you're wasting a lot of other people's time, not to mention your own. You're also wasting the time and resources of the city that picks up your recycling (because it'll have to haul the stuff back to the landfill after losing money sorting it). Finally, you're wasting the time of the MRF employee the city pays to physically separate dirty trash from clean recyclables.

"Materials can be contaminated any number of ways — anything like peanut butter or a napkin from a football game or baseball game with mustard on it. The idea that we're going to collect all those napkins is not realistic," Porter says. (Ironically, though, Arizona's Department of Environmental Quality has doled out thousands of dollars to Little League baseball teams, in hopes that they'll pitch their bleacher litter into recycling bins.)

Gellenbeck says Phoenix MRF employees get most miffed by plastic grocery bags and any "film" plastic. "That material gets commonly stuck in the good stuff. It damages the machines, and sometimes we have to spend a good part of a day pulling a plastic bag out of a machine," Gellenbeck says.

"You don't have to wash your recyclables in the dishwasher or anything. Just make sure they're clean, empty and dry. We can't deal with wet, dirty garbage."

RECYCLING IS EXPENSIVE

Recycling is an expensive undertaking.

The north Phoenix MRF (the one Pela toured) cost $43 million to build and has 31 employees. It processes about 126,000 tons of waste per year, according to Gellenbeck. The SR85 landfill cost about half as much to build ($23 million) and pays fewer employees (23). It packs away nearly 10 times as much waste per year, more than 1 million tons.

The U.S. isn't as short on landfill space as was feared in the late '80s, Porter says. The SR85 landfill won't fill its two-square-mile shoes for another 50 years, according the city of Phoenix Web site. At that point, it will become a park, much like the recently sealed Skunk Creek Landfill, currently undergoing a makeover to become high school baseball fields and parks.

Porter says the impetus behind the curbside-recycling movement was a fear that we'd run out of landfill space. He would know. While at the EPA, Porter was in charge of landfills and Superfund sites when he set the national goal of recycling 25 percent of all waste.

Strict federal regulations (including a series of seals, the interception of hazardous waste, and the siphoning off of methane and other gases from inside landfills) now make landfills safe and clean enough to build high school playing fields on.

"It's not like an aluminum can in the garbage is going to kill you," Porter says, "It's still serious, but it's not life or death."

SO, DOES MY RECYCLING MATTER?