After the gifts are unwrapped and the food is eaten, the holidays often leave us with a lot of trash. Here’s a guide to making sure it all ends up in the right place
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Trash cans routinely overflow during the holiday season, when we generate over 25% more waste than usual. Happily, so do recycling bins: a higher percentage of waste ends up in the blue bins over the holidays than during the rest of the year, says Tom Carpenter, director of sustainability services at Waste Management, North America’s largest waste and recycling company.
Unfortunately, it’s also increasingly common for the wrong things to end up in those recycling bins, he says.
“Many people try to do the right thing,” he said. “More people are trying to put everything into the recycling bins. That’s increased the total volume of material we get, but we’re also seeing many bad mistakes – and more of that volume is actually [trash].”
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