Officially our recycling program takes a lot of surprising stuff, including wax cartons, all types of plastic, and even pizza boxes; glass and metal, too, of course. But no plastic bags and no styrofoam!
Unofficially, though, they only want plastics 1 & 2 and very clean cardboard and paper, if even that. And the metal, but probably not the glass. The thing is that around here the same folks who handle the landfills also handle the recycling, and they will take whatever they can get for free (no money changes hands) if they think they can monetize it - a situation which seems to change on a daily basis. I suspect that an awful lot of what we think we "recycle" around here actually ends up in one of their landfills instead.
its sort of worse than that, a lot of these recycling programs that local councils start running are in fact just rubbish offshoring.
They do deals with big Chinese companies to send recyclables to china to be recycled. Three big problems with this:
1) the climate impact of actually shipping this stuff over seas is huge.
2) There is no oversight on how these companies behave, there has been numerous reports of them NOT recycling at all and many reports of slave labour being used to "sift" the rubbish
3) China is now clamping down on it, they no longer want the rubbish, many councils have no backup plan for this eventuality and yes its likely to head to infill.
In our case we're too centrally located to make shipping stuff offshore economically viable, unlike say the coastal cities. But around here we do have plenty of cheap land available for landfill space, so that's where a lot of our stuff probably ends up. I know that our local recycler does feel at least some of the effects of the Chinese situation, though, and while it hasn't happened yet I fully expect that sometime soon they will be making changes to our current recycling system.
Unofficially, though, they only want plastics 1 & 2 and very clean cardboard and paper, if even that. And the metal, but probably not the glass. The thing is that around here the same folks who handle the landfills also handle the recycling, and they will take whatever they can get for free (no money changes hands) if they think they can monetize it - a situation which seems to change on a daily basis. I suspect that an awful lot of what we think we "recycle" around here actually ends up in one of their landfills instead.