Can you recycle plastic straws?

No. Straws are too small and light for sorting equipment to catch. They drop through the screens and end up as contamination. Bin them, or switch to reusable.

Follow it down the line

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

The material · Sometimes

Is the material recyclable?

Most straws are polypropylene, a plastic that is genuinely recyclable in other formats. The straw form is the problem rather than the polymer. A peer-reviewed case study of drinking straws puts it in one sentence: while PP is recyclable, PP straws are often not accepted by municipal recycling facilities because of their size and shape, and contamination from food. It is worth being precise about what the #5 on a straw means, because this is where the confusion starts. Resin codes identify the polymer, nothing more. The federal reference lists drinking straws under code 5 alongside yogurt containers, margarine tubs, medicine bottles and ketchup bottles, and those objects have wildly different fates in a recycling system despite sharing a number. The code tells you what the plastic is. It does not tell you that anybody will recover it, and on a straw the honest answer is that nobody will. A few grams of thin tube is not worth recovering even in principle, and no separate collection route exists for it.

Sources: Environmental Science & Technology, 2025 (peer-reviewed): a case study of drinking straws, NIH Office of Research Facilities: plastic resin codes

The facility · No

Will a sorting facility recover it?

Straws fall below the size that sorting equipment can act on. The recyclers' own design guidance sets the boundary explicitly: a package needs to be bigger than about 2 inches in its dimensions, or it drops through the glass screens into the waste stream. That threshold is written for package designers, as a floor to stay above. A straw is not near it. Omaha describes the consequence from the operator's side: because of their small, lightweight size, straws fall through the mechanical sorter and go to landfill, or they mix into other materials and contaminate them. Both outcomes happen, and the second is the one that matters, because a straw that ends up in the glass or paper stream has not merely failed to be recycled, it has made something else slightly worse. They are also too light for air separation to place correctly. Nothing on the line is built to catch an object this small and this thin.

Sources: Association of Plastic Recyclers: PP Rigid Natural design guidance, Omaha Recycling Guide: plastic straws

Your curbside program · Never

Will your curbside program take it?

No curbside program accepts loose straws. San Jose's instruction is a single line, put them in the garbage cart, and it comes from a program that is otherwise generous about polypropylene. That contrast is the clearest way to see the point. San Jose accepts plastic #5 in the recycling cart and lists yogurt cups, margarine tubs, syrup bottles and bottle caps as examples, but the wording of the rule is 'containers are OK'. A straw is #5 and is not a container, so it fails a test the polymer passes. Same plastic, same city, same week, different answer, decided entirely by the shape of the object. Several jurisdictions have gone further and restricted straws at source rather than trying to sort them, through on-request-only rules and bans on plastic foodware, which is a fair signal about how solvable the sorting problem was judged to be. If your program's list does not mention straws at all, read that as a no rather than as an omission. Lists name what is accepted, and a straw is small enough that nobody thought to exclude it by name.

Sources: San Jose Recycles: Straws, San Jose Recycles: Plastic #5 (Polypropylene)

What you need to do

Bin them; putting them in recycling makes them contamination rather than material
Do not bundle them into a bottle to 'keep them together'; the bottle then gets rejected too
Paper straws go in the trash or compost, not the recycling cart, once they are wet
If you are keeping a reusable one, keep the cleaning brush with it; unwashed reusables are the reason people go back to disposables

Where else it can go

Refuse the straw

The only route that actually works at scale. Asking for no straw removes the problem rather than relocating it, and it is the one intervention here that does not depend on a sorting line, a program or a scheme.

Some people need straws for medical or accessibility reasons, so this is a default, not a rule for everyone.

Reusable straws

Metal, silicone and glass straws all last indefinitely. Silicone is the most practical if flexibility matters, and metal is the most durable; both end their lives as scrap or landfill rather than as a recycling problem.

Mail-in programs

A few specialty schemes take hard-to-recycle small plastics, straws included, by post. Honest about what this is: a way to keep a specific pile out of landfill, not a solution to a 500-million-a-day object.

Usually paid, and the postage and packaging have their own footprint. Worth it for a cafe, rarely for a household.

Common mistakes

Assuming the #5 marking means the bin will take it. The polymer is recyclable, the object is too small to recover
Stuffing straws inside a recyclable container, which contaminates something that would otherwise have been fine
Reading a program's acceptance of #5 as acceptance of straws. San Jose takes #5 containers and sends straws to the garbage, in the same guide
Thinking a straw in the recycling is harmless if it just gets missed. The two outcomes are landfill or contamination of another stream, and only one of those is neutral
Waiting for a mail-in scheme to make it worth it. Refusing the straw is the only route that works at the scale straws are used