Many take recycling very seriously – and still make mistakes. Or how do you deal with rinsing out yoghurt pots and tetra paks?
It’s not that easy to live more sustainably because there are so many things to consider. A good example of this is the recycling of yoghurt pots.
▶︎ So you should only put them empty, but not rinsed, in the yellow sack or the yellow bin.
The idea of cleaning them after use makes sense when you have to collect the empty packaging around the house for a while and of course you don’t want mold to form.
▶︎ But from a sustainability perspective, rinsing is even bad. Because it only uses water unnecessarily and the washing-up liquid can pollute the water.
▶︎But what you can do: You should scrape out larger remains of the contents, this also applies to other plastic cups for food or Tetra-Paks.
The industry speaks here of spoon or spatula clean as well as drip-free, for example in milk packaging. This is what the recycling initiative “Waste separation works” points out.
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▶︎Broken cachepots do not belong in the recycling!
▶︎ You should also remove other components of the packaging that are not made of plastic: For example, the aluminum yoghurt pot lid.
They are disposed of separately from the cups, even if the aluminum lid can also end up in the yellow bag or bin. According to the Recycler Initiative, the separation here is important so that the sorting plants can recognize that the various materials are not contaminated and are made available separately for recycling.
And you shouldn’t stack the cups on top of each other so that more of them fit in a barrel filling. Because that causes problems for the disposal companies in recycling, since these containers cannot be stacked and run through the sorting plant for recyclable materials without problems.