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“Going green” or “Do the blue” these are just a couple of the colorful slogans that try to get people in east central Indiana to recycle. Perhaps you already recycle. Religiously you look for the triangle symbolizing that the item is recyclable placing it your home or work recycle bin.

Once a week the trash and recycling gets picked up and taken from your home or place of work. Recycling seems so easy.  But what really happens to the plastic bottle, aluminum can, or card board box?

The topic of recycling conjures up a lot of conversation and rumors.

Ball State University graduate student Kellen Meyers heard that if there is one item in your recycling bag that is not recyclable, then nothing in the bag can be recycled, while graduate student Gina Edghill heard that there are certain plastic depending on the codes that cannot be recycled .

And  there is the question about food on your recyclables. Some people say that you need to wash everything while other say you can just throw it away without doing anything to the items.

Jason King, site manager of East Central Recycling (ECR), clears up some of these rumors.

“With today’s technology, with recycling you do not have to clean out your miracle whip jar any more. In the Mill with recycling you have your four main recycling. Glass, aluminum, plastic and cardboard now you get questions about styrofoam and plastic bags, they do not really get recycled the same as the other four categories; they usually go the incinerator. We ship to the incinerator to keep it out of the landfill. The by-product is then used for energy.”

Upon arrival to ECR, your recyclables are unloaded and dumped into one pile. This is where the sorting process starts. King said ECR will sort 12-15 tons per hour, nine hours a day, five days a week.

Between machines and workers, the recycling gets sorted into four categories. Each type of recycling gets bailed and then sorted to get shipped to various mills either in the US or internationally.

This leads to another rumor regarding the cost of recycling. Is it cheaper to throw away all your trash than it is to recycle?

 While Edhill doesn’t really know if it is cheaper she just does it while Meyers thinks recycling is cheaper than creating new.

According to King, “By far, yes it costs more with all the processing. From your curb side to here where we sort.  Huge processing fee. Then it goes to a different mill to get pulped then back on to the shelf where you bought it. Huge cycle. Hard to believe how much money it cost to get from your door step to back on the shelf.

Finally talking about recycling one might question how “green” is Muncie compared to an Indianapolis.

Munice recycles 30 percent of its trash while Indianapolis on recycles 1 percent. So keep on recycling Muncie, because in the long run your carbon foot print will be less then Indianapolis.