Are water bottle lids recyclable?

YorriaRaine

I am very sorry if this is not the proper place for this.

The water in my town is grossly yellow several times a day, everyday, for a long time now. My neighbors and I have complained but the city insist its safe to drink and its just rust build up. Regardless, I'm not drinking yellow water. We have a filter for the showers and the sink and whatnot however it still taste "funny" after being filtered. So, to drink, we use water bottles.

I'm the one who keeps track of the recycling in my house (my family literately would not recycle without me lol), however I was always told the lids are not recyclable. I was told that the lids require a different process because they are made of a different grade of plastic and if you keep the lids separate they just fall through the "cracks" of whatever sorting machine they use. I didn't really ever look up to see if the information was correct and I've just been throwing away the lids the entire time.

However, somebody recently told me you ARE supposed to recycle the lids, and screw them back on the water bottle before recycling. That the machines are sophisticated enough to handle the lids.

So which is it, should you recycle the lids or not?

edit: I also wanted to add, I googled it and found several different responses, hence my confusion.

RunMyOregonBunsOff

Generally not last I heard but there is a cosmetic company that uses them to make caps for their products. I can't remember what it is.

paperpudding

can you ring and ask your recycling plant - or the council or whoever collects the recycling bin.

Sorry, I don't know where you are or what sort of recycling system you have.

Where I live (South Australia) recycling is collected by the council fortnightly. We also have 10c deposits on most drink containers so they can be taken to recycling place separately for refund (obviously when you have enough to make it worthwhile) - but that's another story.

Anyway, we are told to take the lids off the bottles.

I put the lids in the bin and recycle the bottles only.

But this may well depend on the recycling plant's capabilities/machinery and may be different in different places - hence why you are getting conflicting information.

glassyo

And just to confuse matters, I take my plastic bottle recycling to a trailer thingy near my local grocery store and after changing their minds every time I brought the recycling, they finally settled on keeping the caps on the bottles.