09-18-2018, 12:34 PM
In the last few years I've taken a hot water heater, old freezer, and some other random appliance that was dumped onto our road to the transfer station and they took all of them. I knew that TVs were harder to get rid of but I was actually headed to a mulch run on the day that Hilo station was taking them, so I was going to grab a roadside flatscreen on my way but it was already gone. (when stuff is dumped and left there it literally breeds).
The label thing is real, supposedly they aren't allowed to take anything that doens't have a label or other printing that says its HI-5 eligible. A few times I've had them pick them out and toss them in the trash, which is unfortunate because I paid the deposit on them, but what are you going to do?
"As for the lids, the recycler employees want them off because they hold the extra liquid in the bottle representing a false weight."
They have the same rule everywhere including curbside recycling where nothing is counted or weighed. The reason is that the caps are usually made out of a different type of plastic than the bottle. If they come in with the cap still on the bottle, somebody at a recycling plant has to manually remove the cap somewhere down the recycling supply chain or the entire bottle and cap has to be discarded. Now that most of the plastic bottles are winding up in landfills anyway, I doubt any of this is relevant.
The label thing is real, supposedly they aren't allowed to take anything that doens't have a label or other printing that says its HI-5 eligible. A few times I've had them pick them out and toss them in the trash, which is unfortunate because I paid the deposit on them, but what are you going to do?
"As for the lids, the recycler employees want them off because they hold the extra liquid in the bottle representing a false weight."
They have the same rule everywhere including curbside recycling where nothing is counted or weighed. The reason is that the caps are usually made out of a different type of plastic than the bottle. If they come in with the cap still on the bottle, somebody at a recycling plant has to manually remove the cap somewhere down the recycling supply chain or the entire bottle and cap has to be discarded. Now that most of the plastic bottles are winding up in landfills anyway, I doubt any of this is relevant.