Plastic Bags Don’t Belong in the Recycling Bin — Here’s What to Do Instead

It feels intuitive to toss everything with a recycling symbol into your curbside bin, but plastic bags, wraps, and films are almost always the exception. These flexible plastics behave very differently from hard plastics, paper, or metal — and putting them in the recycling bin doesn’t help the environment the way most people think.

The big issue comes down to how recycling systems are built. Most curbside recycling programs are designed to sort and process rigid containers like bottles and cans, not soft, stretchy films. When plastic bags enter this system, they can tangle in machinery, contaminate loads of recyclables, and actually harm recycling efficiency rather than help it.