If you drink wine, you’ll know the caps I’m talking about. They also come on other glass bottled liquids, are made of aluminum and are never mentioned in municipal recycling lists. What’s a person to do with these things?
Here are 3 options:
1) Recycle Them! According to most wine magazines and green advocates the screw tops can be recycled. Well, not in my neighborhood. And here’s what Seattle’s Ask Evelyn has to say on the matter:
“Put small caps in the garbage. Small lids can jam the machinery at the recycling plant.”
Don’t listen to Evelyn. After a few hours of research, I was able to sample enough municipal sights that do take these small caps (Los Angeles, CA and Boulder, CO for example) but they ask you to NOT screw your metal caps back onto your bottles (same goes for metal lids on glass jars) as they will then need to go to a secondary sorting facility where someone will have to take them off. Metals go in metals, glass in glass.
So, here’s the deal: Metal has value. Save those little caps, no matter where you live, and throw them in your municipal metal recycling bin. If you’ve collected enough of them, I doubt they’d turn your accumulated metal away.
2) Even If Your Recycler Doesn’t Take them, Recycle Them Anyway! Here’s how: If you can recycle cans, you can recycle these little screw caps. Step on them to squash them and put them inside your can. Fill your can half way with the little caps. Then, close the lid a little so the caps don’t fall out. It’s subterfuge, but it should keep the caps from getting into the equipment and will add them to the recycling mix. These caps are made of aluminum, so if you want to be a purist, you should probably put them inside an aluminum pop can (that you’ll have to open with a can opener). If you’re really cautious, then save them, as I mentioned above, and put them in the scrap metal bin. We have a friend on our island who collects them, along with all aluminum foil, pie plates, aluminum wine cork wrappers, etc. and she delivers this aluminum to a recycler in Seattle who will pay for it!
3) Screw Cap For Your New Water Bottle: Reuse the cap, wine bottle and all by turning the whole thing into your new glass water bottle. It’s chic, cheap, and easy.
