5 Crucial and Creative Tricks to Effective Recycling in Montana

Recycling in Montana should be easy, not filled with questions about whether you're doing it right.

According to the Smithsonian, only 6% of plastic waste was recycled in 2021. That means only 2 tons of the 40 tons of plastic waste generated in the U.S. was recycled. On a grand scale, we'll have to do better than that—but we've come up with some small-scale suggestions.

Montana is too beautiful for us not to recycle, and recycle properly. Stuff that we can't recycle, consider finding ways to use the items again before tossing them in the trash. A GreenMatters.com article from 2021 states:

According to the EPA, Americans generate more than 267 million tons of solid waste every year. In 2017, only 94.2 million tons of that waste was either recycled or composted.

Those numbers have likely increased since the COVID-19 pandemic, mostly due to the HUGE increase of single-use plastic items. Disposable, one-time use items were everywhere and recycling wasn't top of mind.

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Repurposing clamshell plastic into useful seed starting greenhouses can be really fun to do with kids, but I use these all the time...no kids needed :-) They're amazingly effective and don't take up much space. Get some of those dirt discs, hydrate them, plant your seed and you're all set.

Most cities in Montana do not recycle glass, FYI. But the poster below from the EPA is a good guide for what you can put in your mixed curb-side recycle bin. Larger towns in Montana will let you sign up for curb-side recycling service on the city website.