Recycling

The City’s recycling program only accepts certain materials. These include clean paper and cardboard, plastic bottles, tubs and containers, glass bottles and jars, aluminum foil, and cartons such as milk or juice cartons. Please only recycle those items on ourRecycle Rightlist and make sure to keep all recycling LOOSE inside your curbside cart. Do not bag it.

There are many reasons to recycle, including helping prevent environmental harm, job creation, and supporting the circular economy. However, on a local level, we encourage our residents to recycle to helpextend the life of our landfills.

Oklahoma City is serviced by four landfills, and each has limited space. By diverting good, recyclable materials away from our landfills and into the recycling stream for reuse, we can help extend the useful life of our landfills, which in turn helps keep our future trash and recycling costs low.

Our curbside recycling service hits your neighborhood every other week, on the same day as your weekly trash service. There are four ways you can look up your recycling date: 

• Visit okc.gov/mytrashday and enter your street address into the blank search box on top of the map. Click on the red dot above your street address. A pop-up box with your trash day, next recycling date and next three bulky waste dates should appear. 
• Log into your account on okcutilities.com and look at the Trash & Recycling widget on the main landing page.
• Log into the My OKC Utilities app on your smartphone and scroll through the top carousel to see your next dates.
• Look on the latest paper copy of your OKC Utilities bill. 

Yes!

We get it. Two Big Blues and one Big Green may not be enough. If you find you need an extra cart (or two!), you may order up to two additional Big Blue carts and one Big Green cart (up to six carts total)for an additional monthly fee per cart.To order,log into your account at okcutilities.com, then use the Service tab to order your cart. The number of carts may be restricted if there is not enough space to set the carts at the curb correctly. Please don't use your Big Green recycling cart as an additional trash cart.

Once the contents of your Big Green cart are emptied into a recycling truck, they are combined with items from other households and taken to the local Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) for sorting. Items are emptied directly from trucks into a large warehouse-type space called the “tipping floor.” They are then scooped up and put on a series of conveyor belts to begin the sorting process.

Items are FIRST sorted by hand where workers along fast-moving conveyor belts manually pull unwanted materials out of the recycling stream and put them in chutes to be returned to the landfill. Remaining items go through a series of industrial sorters, including screens, magnets, blowers and an optical scanner that reads plastics by type. Once sorted by material type, they are then bundled, baled and put onto trucks for transport to various manufacturers who accept them for reuse.

• Paper, cardboard and cartons are recycled at two paper mills here in Oklahoma. 
• Glass is transported to north Texas where it is crushed and used to make roadbed, decorative tile, industrial sanding materials, and other glass products.
• Plastics and aluminum are transported to facilities within the South/Southwest region of the US where they are then turned into other consumer goods. Where they go is dependent upon market demand and which facility can accept them at the time we are sending them out.

Contamination describes any item that enters the recycling stream that does not belong there.  Contamination can cost the City and you money since items considered contamination that end up at the MRF have to be removed from the recycling stream and end up back at the landfill.

Contamination includes the following:

• Items that are not recyclable (food, liquids, paint, pool chemicals, garden hoses, clothing and textiles, tires, car parts, etc.)
  -- OR --
• Items that can be recycled but are not accepted in the City's recycling program. These include plastic bags, brittle plastics such as CD covers, etc., hangers or polystyrene foam.

What should you do with these items? For many, we recommend looking at our Reuse and Repurpose page to see where you might be able to take them. 

There are two reasons to not put your recycling IN plastic bags: 

1. Plastic bags are not accepted in our recycling program. This includes all film bags (grocery or shopping bags), trash bags, bubble wrap, snack or pet food bags, magazine or newspaper wraps, bread bags, etc. Plastic bags and similar items get tangled up in our equipment and can cause production to shut down while workers cut the bags out of the sorting screens and cogs. 

2. For production time and worker safety, we can’t open bags to empty contents, even if the bags contain good recyclable items. Recyclable items put into bags and sent to the MRF are pulled out of the recycling stream and returned to the landfill. 

What to do instead?

If you don't want to toss your plastic bags, either ask your local grocer or big box store whether they accept them (many do), or repurpose them for pet waste, trash bags in your car or truck, holiday storage or other purposes.  Remember to keep ALL ITEMS LOOSE in your Big Green cart. 

Just like items that don't belong in the recycling stream, items that are coated with food or filled with liquid are considered contamination. Remember, always make sure items you put in your cart are empty, clean and dry. This means there should not be any food residue or liquid inside of them. 

• For water bottles, you only need to empty them and put the lid back on. 
• For soda, beer or wine bottles, give them a quick rinse before emptying, then put the lid back on and put in your cart. 
• For bottles, cans and jars that contain milk, cream, yogurt, spaghetti sauce, chili and other "gooey" items, rinse thoroughly then set them out on the counter overnight before putting them in your Big Gree recycling cart. Mold and other food residues that remain inside containers can contaminate an entire load of recycling. 

No. Numbers are mainly for use by recycling manufactureres who accept specific types of material for conversion. This is especially true for plastics. If you keep to the list of what items we accept, you should be recycling right.

Wishcycling describes what happens when someone *wants* to recycle something so they toss it in their cart without being 100% certain whether it can be recycled.

This leads to a lot of contamination because people don't follow our Do and Don't list. You can eliminate wishcycling by sticking to the list and only recycling what we accept. 

Lids and labels can both stay on. Just make sure that with any item that has a lid, you empty and dry the item first, then put the lid back on and toss the container into your Big Green cart. Even metal lids can be put back on glass jars.

There's no need to crush any item that goes into your cart, especially plastic bottles. 

Plastics are sorted using an optical scanner that can determine the type of plastic based upon its transparency (clear plastics versus transparent colored plastics versus opaque plastics). Clear containers that are crushed or contain liquids may be mis-read and therefore not sorted correctly. 

Yes! Pizza boxes can be recycled, just use a little discretion. If there's still just a bit of grease on it after removing the paper protector, then it's fine to toss into your Big Green cart, grease and all. But if you got that super supreme extra meat and cheese for the Superbowl party and it still has lots of gooey mess on the bottom, we'd tell you to toss it. Just use some discretion.