How (and why) to recycle in Laramie

Recycling reduces energy use, conserves materials and pollutes less than throwing items in a landfill. No, it won’t fix global capitalism. But it could make you a better activist.

You’re standing at your kitchen counter, considering the various dinner fixings you picked up at Safeway. The amount of packaging is worrying.

Your friends in the Pacific Northwest still remember the record-setting heat dome of 2021; your immediate neighborhood remembers the Mullen Fire of 2020, which torched 176,000 acres and painted the skies above Laramie an apocalyptic smoky red. You think about the one billion animals who burned to death in Australia just before the pandemic and how we’re in the midst of the planet’s sixth great extinction event.

And here you are with plastic and glass and cardboard, a monkey hell-bent on endless consumption, enraptured by the easy access to everything gifted you by global capitalism.

Is it possible to be less wasteful? you wonder.

Where do I start?

Start here, and refer back to this whenever you have questions about what can or cannot be recycled: the City of Laramie’s “What Goes Where” search feature. Type in whatever item or material you’re curious about and the site will tell you if it can go in the blue bin, if it should go in the garbage, or if there’s an alternative way to recycle it.

You can also access this same database of information through the Laramie Waste & Recycling app. The app will also tell you your trash pickup and recycling pickup days if you provide your address.

If you search for an item and can’t find it, the website has an option to “suggest a new item.” You can also give the city a call at 721-5279. City staff can add the missing item to the database.

General information can be found on the city’s main recycling page, while information about the University of Wyoming’s recycling program can be found here.

Check with the above resources if you’re uncertain about a particular item, but here are some helpful pointers:

• Don’t bag your recycling.

• Not all plastics are equal. The city can only recycle No. 1 plastics that are bottles with screw-cap lids, and No. 2 plastics that are shaped like a bottle or jug. Details are available here.

• Glass cannot go in your blue-lidded bin. Glass must be taken to the Laramie Landfill.

• Washed out milk cartons are fine, but in general soiled paper and cardboard (like a greasy pizza box) cannot be accepted.

Why should I bother?

The bad news is that you alone cannot save the planet. The good news is that you can help. And helping starts at home (though it doesn’t end there).

The cardboard from your Signature Cafe Neapolitan Ice Cream Sandwiches 12-pack can gain a second life as something more dignified by going through the city’s single-stream recycling program.

The 8.4oz aluminum cans from your Red Bull Energy Drink Variety Pack can get tossed in the same bin. Vegetable scraps, if you had them, could be composted. The plastic bags can be returned to the store (although really with the convenient handle on the Red Bull Variety Pack, you probably didn’t need to double-bag it). Even the 750ml bottle of Everclear, once you’ve done your patriotic duty to down it, can be recycled if you or a friend can get it to the city dump.

But as you work through your totally normal dinner, the first question you might ask is ‘Why?’

Climate change, deforestation, and other large-scale anthropogenic attacks on the environment are beyond your control. If a handful of transnational companies are responsible for the majority of greenhouse gas emissions, for example, why should you care about the infinitesimal dent you’d put in the overall trend by throwing an 8.4oz can into the blue-lidded bin instead of the black-lidded?

It’s a common question, but it’s one that frustrates City Councilor Erin O’Doherty.

“Even if our efforts or impacts are small relative to large polluters, I don't see why we would abandon our personal responsibility,” she said. “Everything matters.”

Recycling saves a lot of energy. In the case of aluminum cans, recycling saves 95 percent of the energy that would otherwise be required to make a new aluminum can from scratch — given how easy it is to get that aluminum from a recycling facility and how difficult it is to mine new material and process it. A ton of recycled aluminum (or about 62,000 12oz cans) saves 14,000 kilowatt-hours of energy, and 40 barrels of oil. That’s more than a barrel of oil every 1,600 cans.

Different materials will net different energy savings.

A ton of recycled newspapers saves 601 kWh. A ton of office paper 4,100 kWh. A ton of plastic more than 5,700 kWh.

Recycling uses less energy and produces less pollution than the alternative. And the alternative itself is another reason to recycle, O’Doherty said.

“From a city management perspective, properly engineered landfills are expensive and they take up our precious open space,” she said. “We should limit what we put in there to what we can't recycle to save space and extend the life of the landfill. Granted we can't recycle as many things as we would like, but our staff monitors the markets and keeps track of what exactly we can recycle now.”

But there’s a further reason to recycle: it makes you a better advocate for societal-level change.

Research published last summer examined the claim that focusing on personal choices might undermine the fight for systemic change and found that, if anything, the opposite was more likely true.

“A successful climate movement must make progress on two fronts: widely adopting behavior changes to reduce emissions and achieving structural changes through climate policy,” the paper states.

A 2018 Slate article summarized similar findings.

“We don’t recommend taking personal actions like limiting plane rides, eating less meat, or investing in solar energy because all of these small tweaks will build up to enough carbon savings (though it could help),” the article states. “We do so because people taking action in their personal lives is actually one of the best ways to get to a society that implements the policy-level change that is truly needed. Research on social behavior suggests lifestyle change can build momentum for systemic change.”

It’s a point science communicators have also tried to highlight: Taking personal responsibility and demanding systemic changes are not in conflict, despite constantly being framed that way.

How does it all work?

You can’t recycle everything in Laramie, but there’s a great deal you can.

In 2021, Laramie diverted 7,050 tons of materials away from the landfill into some sort of recycling program. The majority of that — about 5,450 tons — came from green waste.

And 1,400 tons — almost 3 million pounds of material — was collected through single-stream recycling. That’s compared to the 26,000 tons of household waste Laramie sends to the landfill in a year.

Single-stream is for household waste; it’s what goes in the bins with the blue lids that get picked up every other week.

“Single-stream recycling means you don’t have to sort things at your house,” Laramie Solid Waste Manager J.D. Slingerland said. “You can put your cardboard with your plastic bottles, your aluminum cans, paper if it’s unshredded, newspaper – it can all go in the same container.”

The city brings all of this to the recycling center at the Laramie Landfill

“In that building, we don’t do any sorting, we just process it into bales,” Slingerland said. “Those bales are then shipped off to a recycling facility in Denver, Colorado. And it’s at that facility that the materials are sorted out into one pile of plastic bottles, one pile of cardboard and so on. From that facility, those single bales of material are sent off to be processed.”

Plastic from bottles finds its way into carpeting. Cardboard finds a second life as more of the same. And the world is spared the additional pollution and energy demands involved in making those products from scratch.

But it doesn’t always go so smoothly.

Part of the problem is contamination, brought about by city residents trying to recycle what cannot be recycled. That could be everything from the wrong numbered plastic to pillows and even diapers. The truck driver tries to keep an eye out for these materials as they’re collecting across town. But they can’t catch everything. And if it’s something messy, like a diaper, it can spoil other material that would have been recyclable if it hadn’t been caked with feces.

But contaminants, like the wrong kind of plastics, do wind up in the bales since Laramie doesn’t sort the recycling before baling it.

“If it makes it past our initial screening and ends up down in Denver, they will actually sort that off with their sorters,” Slingerland said. “That bag of trash, along with contaminated recyclables next to it, that’s going to go to the landfill in Denver.”

And needlessly shipping trash to a landfill in Denver in a diesel-powered truck certainly runs counter to the goals of recycling. The cleaner the recycling, the more efficient the process.

Slingerland said contamination can also make the whole endeavor less financially feasible for the city of Laramie.

“From time to time in Denver, they actually take some of our bales and they sort it out to see how much contamination we have,” he said. “If we have more than 15 percent, we get charged a penalty for that. We are currently being charged a penalty. We’re right above 15 percent, pretty close to getting it taken off. If it continues to increase, then obviously the rate would go up for the contamination fees.”

It’s been difficult to educate the public about what goes in the blue bins and what doesn’t, Slingerland said.

“Probably the biggest difficulty in Laramie is the transient population with the university,” he said. “It seems like every time we get a majority of the population up to speed on our program and our numbers are looking good, school lets out and we get the next batch of students.”

The University of Wyoming actually has its own recycling program, one that is actually less susceptible to contamination. Part of the reason is the difference between the kind of waste people produce on campus and the kind of waste people produce in households. But it’s also because UW doesn’t have single-stream recycling.

Instead, it collects paper, cardboard, plastic bottles and aluminum cans separately in specially marked bins. (In some areas of campus, you will find one bin for both bottles and cans, but those are later separated by UW employees.)

UW Senior Materials and Custodial Services Manager Tod Scott said this results in less confusion and fewer contaminants. When UW recycling is processed in Cheyenne, the university isn’t charged the contamination fee that the city is in Denver.

“Our stuff is typically cleaner,” he said. “Because it’s not single-stream all thrown together, we can get higher prices for the commodities.”

UW also has a method for recycling scrap metal. Taken together, UW recycled 205 tons of material in Fiscal Year 21. It sent about 1,580 tons to the landfill.

But just like city recycling, UW’s program takes community buy-in.

“We depend on the faculty, staff and students actually participating to get the recycling,” Scott said. “We don’t have a law or statute or anything that says you have to. We try to collect as much as we can, but we need people to actually put it in the recycle bin instead of putting it in the trash can.”