Plastic bags and wrapping should never be placed in your recycling bin. Every day, individuals just like you, working at material recovery facilities (MRFs), can spend hours removing plastic bags and other tanglers from equipment. Not only does this create an unnecessary safety hazard for workers, but it also forces the MRFs to shut down, in turn, wasting time and energy that could be used to successfully recover material for recycling. Plastic bags can also become a contaminant by being sorted with other materials and decrease the value and marketability of other recyclables.

You can recycle plastic bags and wrapping by dropping off your clean and dry separated materials at a participating retailer.

What’s on the list?

Find out where you can dispose of plastic bags and film.

It’s important to reuse and recycle plastic bags because they don’t break down quickly in the environment. That’s a danger to wildlife that can get tangled, trapped, and choked by them.