Are yogurt cups recyclable?
It depends
Increasingly yes, but not everywhere. Yogurt cups are #5 polypropylene, which more programs accept every year. Rinse it, leave the foil lid off, and check your own list.
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?
Yogurt and margarine tubs are polypropylene, marked #5. It is a genuinely recyclable plastic with real end markets, and it has been moving steadily from 'hard to recycle' toward routine acceptance as more facilities added the capability. The recyclers' current design guidance treats natural, uncolored PP as the preferred case, and a yogurt tub is close to the ideal shape for their system in a way most things on this site are not. It clears the small size boundary comfortably, since a package has to be bigger than about 2 inches or it falls through the glass screens; it is nowhere near the 7.5 litre ceiling above which containers jam automatic sorting equipment; and it is unmistakably three-dimensional, so it will not be misread as paper. When this item fails, it does not fail for any of the reasons the rest of these pages are about.
Sources: Association of Plastic Recyclers: PP Rigid Natural design guidance, NIH Office of Research Facilities: plastic resin codes
The facility · Sometimes
Will a sorting facility recover it?
Rigid tubs are the right size and shape for sorting equipment to handle, so the mechanical side is not the constraint. A modern line screens by size and shape, splits light from heavy, pulls the metals, and then reads the polymer with near-infrared optical sorters, and a clean tub gives every one of those steps something to work with. What varies is whether a facility separates #5 into its own bale and has a buyer for it. That is an economics question rather than an engineering one, and it is why this item's answer has moved around so much. Worth knowing that 'recyclable' on the pack is a claim about access to facilities, not about what happens to your tub. When How2Recycle labeled polypropylene widely recyclable on the basis that more than 60 percent of Americans have access to a program accepting it, campaigners challenged the label directly, with the chemical engineer Jan Dell arguing that post-consumer PP packaging has never been recycled above a few percent. Access and outcome are different measurements, and the label is the first one. Treat it as the ceiling, not the result.
Sources: Beyond Plastics: the push to label yogurt cups recyclable, Atlantic Packaging: Deep Dive, Sorting Recyclables at a Modern MRF
Your curbside program · Varies
Will your curbside program take it?
This is one of the items where the answer has genuinely changed in recent years, and older advice is out of date. Programs have been adding #5 rather than dropping it. Atlantic County's authority is a useful worked example, because it explains why. In July 2021 it told residents they could put #5 plastics in curbside bins again, having previously stopped, and named the two reasons: an upturn in recycling markets, and a new sorting partner, a facility that was one of only four in the country to receive a grant specifically for improving #5 recovery. That is what carton and tub acceptance actually turns on. Not whether the material is recyclable, but whether the plant your truck drives to has been equipped and has somewhere to sell the bale. San Jose, meanwhile, takes #5 containers in the cart and asks you to empty and scrape them and leave the caps on. Plenty of programs still do not take #5 at all. If you last checked a few years ago, check again, because this is the item on the site most likely to have changed its answer since.
Sources: ACUA: expanding accepted materials to include #5 plastic, San Jose Recycles: Plastic #5 (Polypropylene)
What you need to do
- Rinse it; yogurt residue contaminates and dries hard
- Take the foil lid off; it is a different material and too small to sort
- Leave the plastic overcap on the tub if there is one; San Jose asks for caps kept on
- Do not stack tubs inside each other; nested containers are often missed
- Check again if your last check was more than a year or two ago. This answer moves
Where else it can go
Reuse as storage
Tubs are food-safe containers already, and unusually good ones: rigid, stackable, watertight and free. Leftovers, seed starting, small parts, paint water, freezer portions.
Not infinite. Polypropylene gets brittle and stains, and a cracked tub is back where it started.
Store take-back schemes
Some brands and retailers run collection for their own tubs where curbside will not take them, which is worth knowing if you buy the same yogurt every week and your program does not take #5.
Brand-specific and often paid, so worth it only if you buy the same tub regularly.
Check whether your program changed
More useful for this item than for anything else on the site, because acceptance of #5 has been expanding as facilities upgrade their sorting. A program that said no three years ago may well say yes now, and unlike most of these routes the check costs nothing and takes a minute.
Common mistakes
- Leaving the foil lid attached
- Relying on advice from a few years ago, when #5 acceptance has been expanding, not shrinking
- Reading the recyclable label as a promise about your own curbside program
- Assuming a refusal is about the tub. The constraint is whether the sorting facility bales #5 and has a buyer, which is why one county changed its answer by changing its sorting partner
- Treating access figures as recycling rates. More than 60 percent access is what the label was based on; what share of PP actually gets recycled is a separate and much lower number