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Waste Management explains Kirkland recycling: 'Clean, empty, dry' is key
Summary
Waste Management described how curbside recycling from Kirkland is processed at its MRF, urged residents to follow a simple "recycle right" rule (clean, empty, dry), and answered common questions about items such as bottle caps, pizza boxes and batteries.
Grace Fletcher, education and outreach coordinator for Waste Management, explained how Kirkland's curbside recycling is handled and urged residents to follow simple rules to keep recyclable materials out of the trash.
"If it's a plastic water bottle with a plastic water bottle cap, you can actually just screw the cap back on as long as the water bottle is empty," Fletcher said, describing an approach that prevents loose caps — which are too small for sorting equipment — from becoming contaminants.
Fletcher told the City of Kirkland's podcast that trucks collect residents' blue-bin recycling and deliver it to a material recovery facility (MRF). For Kirkland, that facility is Waste Management's Cascade Recycling Center in Woodinville, which hosts automated and staffed sorting lines that separate cardboard, bottles and cans into bales for manufacturers.
"At the end, you have these beautiful things we call bales, which are really just cubes of super clean recyclables,"…
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