Stanford Medicine Recycles Every Day

Every Nov. 15 is America Recycles Day, a day dedicated to spreading awareness about recycling and the impact of recycling. Learn how to recycle right every day at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health!

At Stanford Medicine Children’s Health, every day is a recycling day, thanks to our three-stream waste-sorting stations! From break rooms to conference rooms and the Harvest Café to the hallways, everyone at Stanford Children’s can make a difference just by disposing of waste properly. Remember to refer to the waste bin label before tossing your trash—we all win when we choose the right bin!

Why recycling? Recycling is an impactful way to reduce landfill waste. Landfill waste is harmful to human health and our environment. Recycling lets us create new items with previously used materials, reducing the need to continue using Earth’s supply of raw materials and natural resources.

How does recycling work at Stanford Children’s? Let’s take a look at an aluminum can. Whether you prefer a Bubly water or a Coke, aluminum is a very recyclable material, and choosing aluminum over plastic improves the recyclability of your beverage.

First, make sure your can is empty before tossing it in a blue bin with a mixed recycling label on it. That mixed recycling bin is lined with a light blue bag. Once the bag is full, our housekeeping team ties off the bag and places it in their cart to transport the recyclables to a soiled utility room. From the soiled utility room, housekeeping brings each bag of waste down to the dock in Stanford Health Care’s 300 Pasteur building.

At the dock, blue bags of mixed recycling are placed in blue bins. Compostables in green bags are placed in the compost compactor, and landfill waste in clear bags is placed in the landfill compactor.

Recycling service technicians then inspect each blue bag of mixed recycling, since contamination is not acceptable in our mixed recycling. Landfill waste or compostables identified in a blue bag of recyclables spoil the entire bag. If contamination is identified by the recycling service technicians, the entire bag must be sent to the landfill. All blue bags of mixed recycling that pass this inspection are compacted together and collected by GreenWaste of Palo Alto, the city’s waste-hauling company.

GreenWaste performs another quality check to ensure that no nonrecyclable materials made it to them, then sorts the recyclables by material type. Like materials are sold in bulk to processors who recycle the materials, typically by melting them down and generating pellets that can be used to make new items. Contamination of our mixed recycling with landfill waste, compostables, or liquids makes it difficult to get clean materials for recycling—if your cardboard box is covered in food waste, the cardboard can’t be broken down into raw paper material because it would introduce rotting food into the recycled-paper stream; if your can or bottle still has liquid in it, it can’t be recycled because that liquid impacts the quality of the aluminum or plastic material when it is broken down to be used again.

What can I do? In a time when there are so many doubts about whether recyclable materials are actually being recycled, these strict no-contamination rules are even more important. The only chance your recyclables have to be recycled is if you sort them properly and avoid contaminating the mixed recycling bin. We can be confident that if sorted properly, our mixed recyclables are being used to create new items.

This America Recycles Day, keep a few tips in mind to help with the quality of our recycling:

No liquids in the mixed recycling—empty your bottle or can before tossing it.

No PPE in the mixed recycling—place PPE like gloves and masks in the landfill bin (unless soiled with blood, in which case use the red biohazard bin).

Let others know that waste sorting matters—our waste does not all go to the same place.