Commingled recycling means placing all your recyclable materials into a single bin rather than sorting them into separate containers. You toss paper, plastic, glass, and metal together, and a specialized facility does the sorting for you. It’s also called single-stream recycling or mixed recycling, and it’s the system most curbside programs in the U.S. use today.
How Commingled Recycling Works
The process starts at your curb. You put all accepted recyclables into one bin, and a collection truck picks everything up together. That mixed load goes to a material recovery facility, commonly called a MRF (pronounced “murf”). Inside, a combination of conveyor belts, spinning discs, magnets, air jets, and optical scanners separates the jumbled mix into individual streams: aluminum in one pile, cardboard in another, different plastic types sorted by resin code, glass by color, and so on.
Once sorted, each material is compressed into bales and sold to manufacturers who turn them back into raw materials. Aluminum bales go to smelters, paper bales go to pulp mills, and plastic bales go to processors that can melt and reform them into new products.
Why Cities Chose This System
Commingled recycling became popular because it makes participation easy. When people only need one bin and don’t have to think about which item goes where, recycling rates tend to go up. Collection is also simpler for haulers, who can use a single truck instead of specialized vehicles with multiple compartments.
The alternative is dual-stream recycling, where you separate paper and cardboard from everything else (glass, plastic, metal). Some communities still use this system, and others have returned to it in recent years, because the materials come out cleaner and sell for more money.
The Contamination Problem
The biggest downside of commingled recycling is contamination. When everything goes into one bin, people inevitably toss in things that don’t belong. Wet food, plastic bags, clothing, and random household items all end up mixed with legitimate recyclables, and some of those contaminants are difficult or impossible to remove at the MRF.
Contamination doesn’t just mean the wrong item gets thrown away. It can ruin entire batches of otherwise good material. A greasy pizza box soaks into clean cardboard. Broken glass shards embed in paper bales, making them unsellable. Plastic bags wrap around sorting equipment and shut down the line, sometimes requiring workers to climb in and cut them free by hand.
The practical result: a portion of what you put in your recycling bin ends up in a landfill anyway. The exact percentage varies widely by community and facility, but the core issue is that mixing materials together inherently makes them harder to sell to manufacturers who need clean, consistent feedstock.
Items That Don’t Belong in the Bin
The most common offenders in commingled recycling aren’t obscure. They’re everyday items people assume are recyclable:
- Plastic bags and film wrap. These tangle in sorting machinery and are rejected by nearly every curbside program. Return them to grocery store drop-off bins instead.
- Cables, cords, and hoses. Anything long and flexible wraps around equipment the same way plastic bags do.
- Batteries and electronics. These are hazardous waste and can cause fires at recycling facilities.
- Clothing and textiles. Donate these or use textile recycling drop-offs.
- Food-soiled paper. A clean cardboard box is recyclable. A grease-soaked pizza box is not.
When in doubt, throwing something in the trash is better than “wish-cycling,” the habit of tossing questionable items in the recycling bin and hoping for the best. Wish-cycling feels virtuous but actually increases contamination and processing costs for your local program.
How to Recycle Properly in a Commingled System
Your main job is to keep materials reasonably clean and dry. Give food containers a quick rinse before they go in the bin. You don’t need to scrub them spotless, just remove the bulk of any food residue so it doesn’t contaminate paper and cardboard sharing the same space. Rinse containers right after you empty them, before food has a chance to dry and cake on.
Keep everything loose in the bin. Don’t bag your recyclables in a plastic garbage bag, because the MRF can’t easily open bags, and the plastic bag itself is a contaminant. Flatten cardboard boxes so they take up less space and flow better through the sorting process. Leave lids on plastic bottles (most programs accept them attached), and check your local program’s guidelines for glass, since some communities have stopped accepting it in the commingled stream due to breakage problems.
Why Some Cities Are Moving Away From It
Several communities have switched back to dual-stream collection after finding that the economics of commingled recycling no longer work in their favor. The city of Hoboken, New Jersey returned to dual-stream collection in 2019 after determining that “global markets have made single stream recycling cost prohibitive.” Multiple other New Jersey townships, including Maplewood and South Orange, made the same switch in 2023 for similar reasons.
The core issue is that MRFs charge processing fees, and those fees are higher for commingled loads because the sorting is more complex. Dual-stream programs produce cleaner, drier paper and less contaminated containers, which sell for higher prices on commodity markets. When recycling markets are weak (as they have been periodically since China restricted imported recyclables in 2018), the quality gap matters even more. Cleaner materials still find buyers; contaminated bales get landfilled.
That said, commingled recycling remains the dominant model in most of the country. For many communities, the higher participation rates and simpler collection logistics still outweigh the quality trade-offs.
New Laws Shifting the Cost Burden
Regardless of which collection method your city uses, the economics of recycling are changing through new state laws called extended producer responsibility, or EPR, requirements. These laws shift the cost of managing packaging waste from local taxpayers to the companies that produce the packaging in the first place.
California, Colorado, Oregon, Minnesota, Maine, and most recently Washington (which signed its law in May 2025) have all passed EPR packaging legislation. The specifics vary: Maine reimburses municipalities directly for recycling costs, while Minnesota requires producers to cover 50% of recycling costs by 2029, scaling up to 90% by 2031. California takes the most aggressive approach, requiring that 100% of covered packaging be recyclable or compostable by 2032.
For residents, the practical effect is that recycling programs may become better funded over time, potentially improving sorting infrastructure and reducing the contamination problems that plague commingled systems today. Producers paying into these programs also have a financial incentive to design packaging that’s actually recyclable, rather than technically recyclable in theory but rejected by every MRF in practice.