Dear TeeCee, Do tiny bits/scraps of paper, including shredded paper, make it from my recycling bin to a paper recycler or do they get blown away in the wind, slimy from any liquids in the recycling cart, lost in process, etc.?  Would it be better to just trash smaller bits of paper like business cards, clipped coupons, bookmarks, shredded paper, etc.?

Thank you, Mario

Dear Mario, If a piece of paper is larger than a sticky note, you can recycle it in your single-stream recycling cart. If it’s smaller, there are some alternatives to the landfill, so keep reading.

There are a few reasons why we can’t recycle tiny scraps of paper like shredded paper if you put it in your curbside recycling cart. As you suspected, it can easily get wet from any liquids left in containers, and then it becomes less of a paper we could market and more of a papier-mâché (a fancy way to describe the gross slurry it will become).

If the scraps make it to the recycling facility still in paper form, they’re likely to become a contaminant in the glass. At the recycling facility, all inbound materials are pushed onto conveyor belts to begin the complicated journey that is the sorting process, involving both automatic equipment and hand sorters. Early on in the process, material moves over a “fines screen,” designed to catch the glass that, at this stage, has been intentionally broken into small pieces to separate it out from all the other material. The screen pulls out the broken glass and anything else that is 2 inches or smaller is going to be pulled out with it.

Little paper scraps (and other smaller objects like bottle caps thrown in the bin loose) will fall through that fines screen and contaminate the glass. So if it’s smaller than a sticky note, we ask that you NOT include it in your curbside recycling bin. Pieces of paper that are sticky note sized or larger, like your coupons and bookmarks, are okay in the bin and will make it over the fines screen.

But you don’t need to landfill those little scraps, you have other options. The first is to avoid shredding paper in the first place. White paper is very recyclable in your single-stream cart until you shred it, so if you have white paper documents that may have sensitive information on them, consider redacting that info with a black marker, or tearing off just the sensitive information so you can recycle the rest of the paper whole. If you have shredded office paper or other smaller scraps,  you can put it in your curbside compost bin or take it to the Longmont Waste Diversion Center for composting.

If you’d like to have sensitive documents shredded and then recycled through a special program, the City of Longmont sponsors free paper shredding events at the Waste Diversion Center every month (for residents only, no businesses). You can see the monthly schedule on the City of Longmont website, The next event is scheduled for Friday, March 5th, from 9am to 1pm.

NOTE: Receipts, like those from the grocery store,  are often a smaller piece of paper, but they are NOT recyclable OR compostable. They have a thin plastic polymer coating on them, and therefore must be landfilled.

Tee Cee

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