I’m guessing because even a little bit of milk turns solid when it spoils. Tea is basically water.

Exactly! Spoiled milk is just nasty. If you were the person handling recyclables, how would you feel having spoiled milk go all over your clothes?

The recycled material must be sorted and then it’s sent to real companies that make it into useful products. Thy must have clean recycled material to make into other things for human use. That’s why they must reject anything contaminated with oil, dirt, or food waste.

I wish we were actually recycling all this plastic. At least paper and metals really do get recycled.

There are so many different plastics used for packaging yet they have to be reprocessed separately. They can’t be melted together to make a new product. That makes it hard to recycle. Some places resort to just burning them, either for heating or for generating power.

^^ Yes, it’s sad how much of the work the public does to recycle is actually a waste! Instead the recyclers are polluting with plastic-burning fumes/pollution. Despite the fact that plastic grocery-type bags can save energy, only about 1% of plastic bags are recycled. Recycling one ton of plastic bags will result in the equivalent of eleven barrels of oil being saved.

I’ve heard there are HUGE warehouses just loaded with the bags; have also heard that quite a number of so-called recyclers don’t recycle…they throw it away, which ends up either in the oceans or the dump.

leftover milk can cause mold to grow, which could lead to your entire recycling load being thrown away