Darkoshi

The below statement (bolded by me) about composite cans was added in 2021, between July and October, per the internet archive.

Richland County, SC - Recycling

Cardboard, Chipboard, & Cereal Boxes
Corrugated cardboard is accepted for recycling - cut or fold so the cardboard fits into the roll cart. Flatten boxes and place them in your recycling roll cart. Spiral Wound Composite Cans (i.e. canned potato chips, nuts, raisins, coffee, etc.) are accepted for recycling. Wax or plastic coated cardboard is NOT accepted. Chipboard boxes such as cereal boxes must be clean and dry and only have stored dry, non-refrigerated foods. Pizza boxes are recyclable- the pizza is not! So make sure the pizza box is free of ALL food debris (and the extra cheese)

I'm surprised they accept the composite cans now, as the cardboard part usually has a film of metal and/or plastic foil attached. I've been in the habit of separating the metal from the rest, and peeling the foil off the cardboard when possible.

For "cardboard cans", the Recycling Wizard says to "Please put metal and plastic lids in garbage."

Per the above guidelines, I suppose I'm doing a bad thing when I put paperboard boxes from refrigerated and frozen items in the recycling bin. But they are clean boxes; the food contents usually are in plastic bags inside the boxes. And the cardboard tears the same easily as non-refrigerated boxes. So I have a hard time convincing myself that there's any difference; they don't *seem* to have a plastic coating.

[Trying to convince myself...]

Per this video from a different jurisdiction: Why Aren't Frozen Food Boxes
Recyclable?, "Frozen food boxes are sprayed with a polycoat to protect from freezer burn."

It makes sense that the cardboard would be coated. If the coating is thin enough, it probably doesn't inhibit you from being able to tear it. But wait, what about refrigerated (non-frozen) boxes? Would they be coated too? You don't get freezer burn in the refrigerator. But I think many things sold in the refrigerated section are kept frozen in transit and storage. So, maybe.

Per that video, the reason why gable-top cartons are an exception and are accepted is because the manufacturers buy them back to recycle them themselves. I hadn't heard of that before. In that case, I'm doing a bad thing by tearing open the cartons to more easily rinse and flatten them. Doing that makes them less distinguishable from other flattened paperboard, for purposes of separating them out.

For gable-top cartons, our waste wizard says "Empty and open to air dry. Discard caps in garbage." So I suppose it's still ok to break open the top part for purposes of cleaning them and tearing off the part with the plastic spout. Although maybe even that is wrong, because doing that makes the cartons more crushable, and then they are less distinguishable again.

I wish the wizard and guidelines had way more details. (The wizard doesn't even clearly say that some items are recyclable even when the guidelines do; but that's a separate issue.)

TO DO: Next time I am discarding a frozen box, tear a piece off and soak it in water, and do the same with a piece torn off a cereal box for comparison.

Update, 2025/07/06:
I soaked small pieces from two frozen food boxes and one non-refrigerated food box. One of the frozen food boxes had a thin layer of plastic on it. The other two boxes didn't have plastic, as far as I could tell.

Note to self:

Food Lion's store-brand Potato Sticks come in a cardboard canister.
It has a symbol and text on it indicating it is a multi-layer canister and not recyclable.
I can see the foil layer on the inside of the container.
The outside layer doesn't look like foil, however peeling some of it off shows that it has a very thin layer of foil on its other side too.

So other canisters like this probably use foil on both sides too, even when it isn't apparent.

..

The RC Recycling Wizard indicates that "Plastic tubs & lids" are recyclable; to "Please clean of any food waste and secure lid on container."

I would think the #4 plastic lids from metal/cardboard canisters should be recyclable too as they are the same number plastic. I've been throwing them away. But maybe I could recycle them if I put them inside one of those lidded all-plastic tubs.
(I wonder if the color matters. The all-plastic tubs tend to be white. The lids of other containers tend to be other colors.)

(I normally remove the metal ends of the cardboard canisters so as to recycle them. I bend them in half and put them inside a regular metal food can. I have nagging worries that I'm not supposed to do that. I don't know if it is the same kind of metal. But I also have nagging worries that I shouldn't throw away recyclable metal, so I feel anxiety either way.)

The RC Recycling wizard says to put "Envelopes (with plastic windows)" in the recycling cart.
So I do NOT need to cut out the plastic windows first.

Today I found out that Batteries+Bulbs takes button batteries, in addition to other batteries, for recycling.

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I went to Big Lots, expecting there to still to be Halloween decorations & lights available. It's still two weeks away, after all. Instead, they had Christmas stuff. I got a blue LED light strand.

While I was browsing one side of the store, I kept smelling weed even through my face mask. No one was nearby that I could see. I wondered if someone was smoking it in the back of the store, or if someone smelled so strongly of it that it lingered after they'd walked by.

Shopping really gives me a lift sometimes, finding things that look tasty&vegan&organic, or pretty&useful, or just-what-I-needed-or-wanted. I don't get that lift with known brands that I've had before, unless they are something really good and on sale for a great price. It's mostly with items that are new to me, unknowns, surprises. Big Lots is good for that, because I never know what I might find there.

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I suppose it's best not to give someone else in your household a food or drink you like a lot. It's a repeated anguish seeing it there, unopened, every time you open the refrigerator. You can't have it, because you gave it to *them* as a gift. I need to remind my niece about that bottle of Mama Chia Blackberry Hibiscus, cuz if she don't want it, I *will* drink it.

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Last week while I was working with the windows open, I kept hearing an unfamiliar whining/buzzing noise. I finally looked outside. It was a flying drone! Up over the area across the street where the erstwhile strip mall is. V-shaped, black, with white on the tips of the wings. It must have had propellers, but was too far away to see them. At one point it went up very high, and made me worry. No planes in the area, but still. What if it lost control and fell?

Come to think of it, I think there's a county sheriff's station in that strip mall now. I wonder if it was law enforcement testing out a new gadget, rather than some random person having fun.

Note to self: If the label doesn't come off cleanly, without leaving sticky residue behind, cut it off.
Do this for any plastic bag which has paper labels stuck to it, not only ones that include that text advisory.

See:
https://wgpc.org/wp-content/uploads/page/154/store-drop-recycling.pdf
"You can help by peeling off any paper labels before taking your bag to the Store Drop-Off location. If the labels don’t peel off easily, you can cut them off with scissors"

https://theorganicadventurer.com/2018/07/09/what-to-do-with-those-weird-plasticky-amazon-mailers/
"If that label stays on, it turns the mailer into a “mixed material” that’s even harder to recycle. It could gum up the machinery or have to be removed by hand at the recycling plant, which takes time and probably a human. All that costs the recycler money and makes them not want to recycle those mailers anymore."

#Asked: How does recycling in Columbia work?

Apparently we're not supposed to crush aluminum cans anymore. That's the first time I've heard that.

A while back while squirting toothpaste onto my toothbrush, a tiny bit of it splashed into my eye (don't ask me how). It burned for a moment, then was ok.

A few weeks ago, while filing away some papers, the corner of one sheet of paper hit my eyeball (don't ask me how). It hurt like hell. Worrying that I've got a severe injury always makes it worse, too. I kept thinking that my eyeball must have gotten a paper-cut. After some minutes, I was able to look in a mirror (with difficulty) to verify there was (probably) no shard of paper still stuck in there. The eye kept tearing up, so I had to press a washcloth against it for a couple of hours to soak up the tears, as well as to block the ambient light which was painfully bright.

The incident with my eye happened 40 minutes before a scheduled Spectrum appointment, for my intermittent connectivity problem (which since that last appointment has not recurred, hurrah!) That was the 4th appointment for the same problem; the 3rd time was not the charm. I didn't want to cancel the appointment. So when the tech came, and for most of the time he was here, I kept holding the washcloth against my eye. The tech was unperturbed.

After a few hours the pain was mostly gone and my vision seemed normal. For the next few days, the eye ached only slightly and sporadically. Then it felt completely normal again.

Last week, toothpaste accidentally spritzed into my eye again. This time, it hurt quite bad, and continued to hurt badly for 10 to 15 minutes even after rinsing out my eye as well as I could. It was the same eye which had the paper-cut. Maybe the cut wasn't completely healed after all, and the toothpaste irritated it again. This in spite of it being the wintergreen-flavored toothpaste which is fairly mild. The peppermint and spearmint flavors are too strong for me; they make my mouth burn.

One of the pages I found while searching on "toothpaste in eye" mentioned that most toothpastes shouldn't be dangerous to the eye... except perhaps if it's one of the whitening kinds with silica, as those are more abrasive. I thought to myself, well I know mine doesn't have silica. I purposely don't buy that kind, because their whitening power comes from sanding off the outer layer of tooth enamel. I'm trying to increase my amount of tooth enamel, not decrease it.

But yesterday I happened to look at the ingredient list on the toothpaste tube. Surprisingly, the main inactive ingredient after water was "hydrated silica". I could have sworn it used to be calcium carbonate. Did they change the ingredients?

Then I remembered that I have a small box full of empty toothpaste tubes. They can't be put with the regular recyclables, but there's a place - TerraCycle that takes them for recycling, if I ever accumulate enough of them to make it worthwhile to send them.

So I checked the box, and found an older tube, which indeed has a slightly different ingredient list. Both the old and new tubes mention "whitening" on the front, but somehow I'd never paid attention to that.

(OLD) Inactive ingredients: glycerin, water, calcium carbonate, hydrated silica, xylitol, carrageenan, natural flavor (wintergreen oil and other natural flavor), sodium lauryl sulfate, sodium bicarbonate, zinc citrate.

(NEW) Inactive ingredients: water, hydrated silica, sorbitol, xylitol, glycerin, natural flavor (wintergreen oil and other natural flavor), sodium lauryl sulfate, zinc citrate, xanthan gum, titanium dioxide, carrageenan.

The Tom's of Maine (my toothpaste brand) website says:

In our Antiplaque Tartar Control & Whitening flavors, the hydrated silica we use is milled to produce a slightly larger particle size (an average particle size of 10 microns, versus 8 microns, on average, in our children's and Wintermint flavors). This makes it a better cleaner, so that it can help to remove stains that have formed on teeth.

So at least the silica in my toothpaste is small-sized. If it were only that, I might continue using it. But with this new propensity for splashing into my eye, I'll be looking for an alternative. (Is it unreasonable to think that brushing one's teeth or doing paperwork shouldn't require wearing safety goggles?) Now when I brush my teeth, I've started holding the tube at arm's length and pointing it away from me.

All About Whitening Toothpastes - has a chart comparing the abrasiveness of different brands of toothpaste.
Setting the record straight about toothpaste abrasivity - says there's no difference in tooth-wear, as long as the toothpaste is under 250 RDA. I don't quite believe that.

Today (or rather yesterday), I:
- got more than 8 hours sleep
- turned in some old/broken electronics for recycling at Best Buy
- took some clothes & other stuff to Goodwill
- returned an unopened wireless doorbell to Lowes (Qiao bought it, but I wanted to get a different one that can be plugged into an outlet rather than requiring batteries)
- went grocery shopping

While sleeping, the last part of a dream involved a long flight of marble steps, outside, which I sat down on and slid down. I was expecting a somewhat rough ride on my butt, but it was gentle, comfortable, so I laid back all the way and closed my eyes for a bit. I reached my right arm out to slow down and stop myself. The steps went down into a large body of water (which wasn't there to begin with, but appeared while I was descending) and I stopped before reaching the water. But then all of a sudden before I could get up, this guy sat his heavy self down on me and started pressing hard on the jugular vein on one side of my neck, as if trying to make me pass out. Though I suppose he would have needed to do both sides of my neck to accomplish that. Then I woke up.

While shopping, I picked up a case (12 units) of Tofutti non-dairy American Cheese slices which I had ordered, since no stores in the area carry it anymore that I'm aware of. It goes on my lunch sandwiches for work, along with Vegenaise and Tofurky vegan pepperoni.

The intersection of Forest Drive and Beltline Blvd has some kind of noise device installed that must be intended for helping visually impaired people. Something like an Accessible Pedestrian Signal, I suppose. But it doesn't make a chirping, beeping, or cuckoo noise. It doesn't have a voice saying "Walk". It makes a HORRENDOUSLY LOUD SCREECHING BUZZING noise. I can't imagine who thought such a thing would be a good idea. I feel sorry for anyone who has to work in the area. Is the noise intended for people who are both blind and almost deaf?

If the noise only came on when a visually impaired person was walking in the area, it would make more sense to me (though if it were me, I'd avoid walking in that area at all costs, to avoid the horrible noise). But it never turns off from what I can tell. Surely in this day and age, where nearly everyone has a cell phone, apps could be available to allow people to trigger the noise makers only when they are nearing the intersection and actually need the audible assistance.

I've encountered a few other intersections with way too loud noise-makers (beepers and tickers), but this one has got to be the worst. I wouldn't want to live within a half mile of it.

I tried to find a video of the noise, but failed, even though I found a video of the intersection from February. Either the noise-maker is very new, or the news station edited that sound out of the video, or maybe it doesn't make noise all the time after all.

I noticed a blurb on a Tom's of Maine toothpaste tube: "Recycle this and other packaging through the TerraCycle collection program ..."

The Tom's of Maine page says:
Together, we'll transform packaging waste, regardless of brand, into useful, new products and lighten the load on landfills.
- Toothpaste tubes, deodorant containers, plastic soap wrappers, mouthwash bottles and dental floss containers
- All brands accepted, not just Tom's

This sounds like a good thing. Besides toothpaste tubes, most deodorant containers (of the brands I've used) don't have a recycling number on them, so I can't put them with the regular recyclables that are collected by the county.

The corresponding TerraCycle page indicates that they also take toothbrushes, another thing I've never been able to turn in for recycling before.

You don't even have to pay for shipping the items; they'll provide you with shipping labels.

TerraCycle has additional similar programs for recycling other products that usually aren't recyclable, including writing instruments (pens, pencils, markers), drink pouches, and snack bags.

Something about it all raises my suspicions though. Watching a few of their videos indicates that they do either of 2 things with the items sent in. It's the "upcycling" part which bothers me, whereby the packaging is flattened (and laminated?) and sewn together to create bags, pouches, etc. with the various brand names prominently displayed (for example, this CapriSun backpack). How many people would really want to buy bags and such with brand-names prominently displayed like that? This seems corny and marketed to people who would see something like that and think "cool, it's obviously recycled, so I should therefore buy it". Now, I'm all for buying items made out of recycled materials, but I wouldn't buy a bag like that... unless I was feeling very very fond of the company whose brand was being displayed.

The other part, where they flatten and shred the items in order to make plastic pellets and other such materials makes much more sense to me. But I wonder what kind of materials they really can make from some of these items, like plastic/aluminum composite drink pouches and snack bags, and how much of a market is there for those materials. Is this really a profitable business model? Or is it mainly intended to allow the various companies whose items are recycled to market themselves as "green"?

Many of the listed recycling programs ie. "brigades" include a brand-name, eg. "Snack Bag brigade sponsored by Frito-Lay", where apparently that company sponsors the program. But most of the FAQs indicate that they take any brand of item to recycle, not only items from the listed company.

There are some clothing donation bins around town marked with "secondliferecycling.com". That website, however, says "Site Under Maintenance". It's apparently been that way for a long time, as Google's search results display the same text for the site.

The only info I found on the organization that owns the bins is the following.

Local Charities Concerned About For-Profit Clothing Donation Bins

Collection bins are popping up all over town. Some are red, some are green and some are blue. For most people, it's an easy way to drop off old clothing so it can go to charity.
...
And even though some of the donation boxes do support charities, most of the ones we spotted came from for-profit companies, like "Better World Recycling" and "Second Life Recycling". According to Georgia state law, those collection bins are supposed to let people know they are not a charity, but we found dozens across town that weren't labeled that way.