‘There’s always a shoe’: What to recycle, and what not to recycle in the Triangle [Video]

When it comes to curbside recycling, you usually don’t need to rinse containers, take lids off bottles or remove tape from cardboard boxes. But please stop putting shoes and batteries in your recycling bin.

That’s right: People put shoes and batteries in their recycling bins.

Don’t put clothes or plastic grocery bags in there either.

Bags and plastic films can usually be recycled at your grocery store. But when you put them in a curbside recycling bin, they gum up the machines that Sonoco Recycling and other companies use to sort recyclables, wrapping around machine parts and shutting down the system.

Don’t bag your recyclables either.

This is some of the advice that local recycling programs offer as they try to clean the stream of bottles, cans and other recyclables that come through their facilities, and boost the percentage of cast-offs that actually get recycled by curbside sorting programs across the state. WRAL News visited …