Can you recycle plastic bags?

Usually no

Yes, but never in your curbside bin. Plastic bags jam sorting machinery, so they have to go to a store drop-off bin instead, and most large grocery chains have one near the entrance.

Follow it down the line

Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.

The material · Yes

Is the material recyclable?

Grocery and shopping bags, and most stretchy plastic film, are polyethylene, which is genuinely recyclable and has real end markets, composite decking and new film among them. Nothing about the plastic itself is the problem. The recyclers' own design guidance treats every grade of PE film as preferred material, HDPE, LDPE, LLDPE and the rest, and it says plainly where the stuff comes from: residential postconsumer film is collected primarily at retail locations, mostly grocery stores. That is not a workaround or a second best option. It is the collection system the industry actually built for this material, and the reason your bin is the wrong destination is that a different one already exists. Purity is what the guidance cares about. A film that is more than 90 percent PE by weight is the preferred case; between 80 and 90 percent it has to be tested before anyone will call it recyclable. Density matters for a mechanical reason worth knowing, because film reclaimers separate materials in float-sink tanks. PE floats. A film loaded with dense additives or fillers until it passes the density of water sinks instead, and becomes waste at the very plant meant to recycle it. That is why a stretchy bag and a crinkly wrapper are not interchangeable, even though both are plastic film.

Sources: Association of Plastic Recyclers, Association of Plastic Recyclers: PE Flexible design guidance

The facility · No

Will a sorting facility recover it?

This is the whole problem, and it is mechanical rather than chemical. Sorting facilities call bags and film 'tanglers': they wrap around the spinning shafts and screens that separate paper from containers, and they keep wrapping until the line has to be stopped. Cuyahoga County describes them wrapping around the equipment discs and wheels until they can shut down an entire materials recovery facility. Recycle Ann Arbor is blunter about what that costs: bags and film tangle in the gears of the collection trucks as well as in the sorting equipment, causing delays and shutdowns that can last for hours, and they pose major safety concerns for the workers who have to clear them. There is a real number on this. When the Recycling Partnership surveyed its MRF working group in 2017, gathering data from 37 facilities across companies that process a large share of the country's biggest MRFs, plastic film and bags came out as the top-ranked contaminant of the ten identified, and accounted for 24 percent of the entire cost of contamination on their own. Tanglers of the rope and cord kind added another 7 percent. Only refuse, at 40 percent, cost more. Those costs were counted across disposal, lost value of other recyclables, labor, equipment repair and wear, facility downtime and staff injury, which between them are a fair description of everything a plastic bag does to a sorting line.

Sources: CuyahogaRecycles: Dispose of Tanglers Right, Recycle Ann Arbor: plastic bags and film, The Recycling Partnership: 2017 Costs of Contamination, MRF Working Group Survey

Your curbside program · Rarely

Will your curbside program take it?

Effectively no US curbside program accepts loose polyethylene bags or film. The instruction that comes with that is the one people skip: put the recycling into the cart loose, not bagged. East Lansing says it twice on the same page, and Cuyahoga County's answer to the same question is a single line, place items loose and not bagged in your recycling cart or bin. The reasoning is worth spelling out, because bagging things up feels like the considerate thing to do. A bag of recyclables does not arrive at the facility as a tidy parcel. It arrives as the one item the plant is fighting hardest, wrapped around all the material you were trying to help. Tying the bag has not sorted your recycling, it has added the top-ranked contaminant to it, and the bag has to come back out of the machinery by hand either way. Loose is not untidy here, it is the only form the sorting line can read.

Sources: City of East Lansing: plastic bags and film, CuyahogaRecycles: Frequently Asked Questions

What you need to do

Never put bags in the curbside bin, loose or full
Never bag your recyclables; every program asks for them loose
For drop-off: clean, dry, and empty out receipts and crumbs
Stuff everything into one bag so it stays together in the collection bin
Stretchy passes, crinkly does not. If it snaps back when stretched it is the right plastic

Where else it can go

Store drop-off

The route that actually works, and the one the recycling industry designed for this material rather than a fallback. Large grocery and retail chains keep a collection bin near the entrance, and what it gathers goes to processors built to handle film without jamming. Bread bags, produce bags, bubble wrap, air pillows, case wrap and the stretchy overwrap from a pallet of water bottles all belong in the same bin.

Must be clean, dry and free of food residue. Wet or greasy film is worth less than nothing to a reclaimer.

Reuse

Bin liners, pet waste, packing material, or simply carrying shopping again. Reuse displaces a new bag one for one, which beats recycling on every measure, and it is the only route with no sorting step to get wrong.

Switch to a material the cart can read

Paper grocery bags and a durable tote both end the problem at the source. This sounds like a lecture and is really just arithmetic: the film that never enters the bin is the film nobody has to cut out of a disc screen.

Common mistakes

Bagging recyclables 'to keep them tidy', which adds the single top-ranked facility contaminant to an otherwise good cartload
Assuming the recycling symbol on a bag means the curbside bin will take it
Including crinkly film like cereal liners or crisp packets, which are a different plastic and are not accepted at drop-off
Treating all plastic film as one material because it all looks alike. Reclaimers separate by density in a float-sink tank, and a film filled until it is denser than water sinks and becomes waste at the plant meant to recycle it
Taking film to a drop-off damp or full of crumbs, when the whole value of the route depends on it arriving clean and dry