Only 17% of Pittsburgh's garbage gets recycled. Here's why.

PITTSBURGH (KDKA) — Is recycling working? We all assume it is when we put our recycling bins out on the curb every week. But the truth is much of it, especially plastic, is ending up in our landfills and polluting our lakes and oceans.

It's called it wish-cycling. We put stuff out on the curb and we hope it's being recycled, but you might be disappointed to learn how much of it actually goes to landfill.

Every morning throughout the Pittsburgh region, recycling trucks pick up the plastic, glass and cardboard that's put on the curbside and haul it to recycling centers for sorting, resale and hopefully reuse. But a lot of the items don't make it.

"Just this week alone, we've seen garden shears, cast-iron skillets, circular saws come through the recycling bins. That's stuff that doesn't belong in your single stream bin," said Ericka Young with Waste Management.

Three decades after the state mandated recycling, most people don't know what is and what is not recyclable. But it's not our fault. The rules are complicated and every municipality has its own. The sad truth is the vast majority of plastics made in the U.S. are not recyclable.

"There are so many plastics that are not recyclable in your curbside and a lot of them don't have any market that the regular person who's not living recycling is not sure what can and can't go in," said Sarah Alessio Shea with the Pennsylvania Resources Council.

Basically, the only plastics that do recycle are plastic bottles or jugs with bottlenecks. Clamshells that hold produce like strawberries and blueberries aren't recyclable, nor is styrofoam.

According to a city controller report, just 17 percent of Pittsburgh's garbage actually gets recycled, with more than 80 percent of it ending up in the landfill. This is considerably less than the 32 percent national average and the Environmental Protection Agency's goal of 50 percent by 2030.

The city allows residents to put glass bottles in their recycling bins but they often break before they get to the recycling center and contaminate the rest of load, So, every other week or so, people in Allegheny West bring their glass bottles over to retired Post-Gazette columnist Brian O'Neill instead.

"They drop it here so that I have a full car load when I go," O'Neill said.

O'Neill drives the neighborhood's supply to a collection site in the Strip District to make sure it's properly recycled. But the city has only two collection sites for glass and O'Neill is one of the few residents who make trip.

"The only way this works is if there were 100,000 Brian O'Neills doing this," KDKA-TV's Andy Sheehan said.

"That's a frightening thought," O'Neill replied.

The other way is technology. Waste Management is doing a $20 million upgrade to its Neville Island recycling center, which has scanners to sort the glass from other materials, decreasing its contamination rate from 18 percent to 10 percent. The system will then clean the glass and make it ready for resale.

"We're in the process of installing a glass cleaner system that's going to remove the contaminates from the glass and let us send a cleaner quality product to our end user," Young said.

The difference between wish-cycling and recycling may involve new technology but more importantly public education about what is recyclable and what's not.