Framingham Recycling 411
By Macy Lipkin
You can listen to Macy’s interview with Eve Carey:
Meet Framingham’s Recycling Coordinator: Eve Carey is the Municipal Recycling Coordinator for the City of Framingham. But she doesn’t see recycling as a saving grace.
“Recycling is not the answer to our overwhelming waste and consumption problem. It’s always going to be better to reduce and reuse before you recycle,” said Carey.
That said, recycling is better than sending everything to the landfill. Carey has been working to inform residents about what can and can’t go in their recycling bins.
Following the rules will increase the odds that your waste is actually recycled.
Recycling audits: Most mornings, Carey picks a section of the city where garbage is scheduled for pickup and looks through recycling bins for things that aren’t supposed to be there.
“I’m looking for anything that doesn’t belong there,” said Carey. “Anything that’s not one of the big five—paper, cardboard, plastic, metal, glass—and you know that there are nuances to even those descriptions.”
Carey leaves stickers on bins that miss the mark. These aim to educate residents on recycling dos and don’ts. They do not come with a fine.
Framingham Public Works published a chart of the most common contaminants on Facebook.
The weirdest thing Carey has found in a bin was a live rabbit. “I don’t think it was put there on purpose, but I did set the little guy free,” she said.
Plastic bags and thin plastic are not curbside recyclable. You can take them to a designated dropoff at a grocery store, but they cannot go in your bin. Air pillows, plastic Amazon envelopes, and plastic bags get tangled in the sorting machines at the recycling facility. If you leave your recyclables in a plastic bag, that whole bag will get thrown out.
“The first line in a MRF [materials recovery facility] is human pickers who are going through and looking for really out-of-place stuff and throwing it off the line. So plastic bags in that line are gonna get chucked immediately,” said Carey, because staff can’t tell what’s in them.
Dump your recyclables straight into the bin or pack them loosely in paper bags. If items get stuck in a bag—even a paper bag—the whole bag could get thrown out.
Don’t be fooled by plastic bags marketed for recycling. These are not curbside recyclable either.
Framingham sends its recycling to E.L. Harvey in Westborough. Staff and machines sort through the items to discard things they can’t process. The facility then bales materials like plastic, metal, paper, and glass, and sells them.
So, is my recycling getting recycled? The city will take your things to a recycling facility, which wants to recycle them so it can make money. Carey can’t guarantee that those materials get recycled, but if E.L. Harvey keeps taking Framingham’s recycling, odds are they’re turning some profit.
Rinse your recyclables! Just how clean do things have to be? “The guidance that I’ve heard is that you shouldn’t be able to tell what was in the container,” said Carey. If there’s a bit of oil residue left from your peanut butter, that’s fine. But there should not be globs of peanut butter, she said.
Black plastic is not recyclable. E.L. Harvey uses optical sorters to go through items, and “those lasers can’t pick up that [black] pigment,” said Carey.
Small items will fall through cracks in the machinery. “The regular guidance is no smaller than a credit card,” said Carey.
For more info and a searchable database of what can and can’t go in the bin, visit the Curbside Recycling page of the Framingham website or recyclesmartma.org.
Macy Lipkin is a journalist and lifelong Framingham resident. She's seen too many recycling bins overflowing with plastic bags or styrofoam, so she spoke with Eve Carey to help get the word out about what can and can't go in the bins.