HoneyCan Method Recycle 101: When your partner asks "Honey, Can I Recycle This?"

The HoneyCan Method™

"Honey... Can I Recycle This?"

Many of us in the recycling industry eventually develop what I call the HoneyCan Method.

The HoneyCan Method isn't about knowing everything.  It's about knowing what matters most.

In my case, my life partner is a brilliant multilingual Ph.D., an endowed professor at Middlebury College, and—if I'm being honest—the principal reason Good Point Recycling survived its early years. Every time I took a business risk, or simply made a bad call, she quietly kept the household solvent until I figured things out.

This morning she walked into the kitchen holding an empty white-and-blue deodorant stick.

"Honey... can I recycle this?"

Every recycler reading this already knows the problem.

It's an admittedly difficult question. The Addison County Solid Waste Management District could give one answer. The hauler another. The MRF operator another. And after thirty-five years in the recycling business, I could probably give half a dozen different answers before breakfast.

Experience has taught me that this is usually a mistake.

(🟢 See Geek Note #1 if you're one of my fellow recycling nerds.)

Years ago I would have launched into a discussion of resin codes, MRF sorting equipment, commodity markets, "acceptable contaminants vs. recycling poison" and why the answer is "it depends."

If you use the blog search box for "cognitive dissonance", you'll see a recurring theme (and personal struggle).

Too Much Information is its own form of misinformation.

My wife has patiently spent years listening to me mansplain to her why tearable plastic isn't necessarily paper, why waterproof paper isn't really paper, and why a plastic window in an envelope matters. I have explained fiber recovery, hydropulpers, contamination rates, and every other fascinating detail that recycling professionals love.

She has a lecture to give in ten minutes.

She doesn't want a graduate seminar in materials management.

She wants to know whether to put the deodorant stick in the trash or the blue recycling bin.

That's how the HoneyCan Method evolved.

"Honey... can I recycle this?"

I also recognize the expression she gives me now. We call it the "smile and wave."

She genuinely appreciates that I've devoted my career to recycling. She even finds my enthusiasm charming.  But in this context, she's like 5-year-old Robin taken to visit great-aunt Nelle Freeland in her Alzheimer's bed, with grandma instructing me "Smile and wave, Robby, she doesn't remember you but she likes that".

My wife just doesn't need every deodorant stick to become a discussion that somehow wanders through the Basel Convention, Indonesian paper mills, cognitive dissonance, and—because this is my blog—the General Mining Act of 1872.

(🟢 Geek Note #2 is waiting patiently at the bottom if that's your thing.)

So after thirty-five years, here's how I explain recycling to beginners.

1. Aluminum is incredibly important.

If you recycle just one aluminum can, you've probably accomplished more environmental good than correctly sorting a dozen questionable plastic items.

Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy that, as the old recycling saying goes, it's roughly equivalent to filling that can halfway with gasoline.

In fact, if you have to choose between spending your time worrying about 20 odd plastic containers or picking up one abandoned aluminum can from the parking lot...

Pick up the aluminum can.

The free market already understands this. You almost never find aluminum cans sitting in a landfill in the developing in the world for very long... people actually live at the landfill to prevent that. Someone will recover them because they actually have value.

2. Steel and electronics matter more than most people realize.

Scrap metal is underappreciated in municipal recycling discussions precisely because private markets already recover so much of it. The recycling industry doesn't spend much time celebrating things that already work well. REMA is way bigger than Packaging Recycling for a good rea$on.

3. Paper is important.

But clean paper is more important than contaminated paper. One plastic bag in a paper bale doesn't discount the whole bale, but it's an enormous source of problems (the Indonesian origin of the Basel Convention BAN Amendment on mixed plastic, geek friends, was the plastic residue at a recycled paper mill).

Usually it's better to throw away one questionable item than contaminate an otherwise valuable bale of paper.

Let's just skip talking about glass (true recycling vs. glass aggregate "diversion") except to say "not the ceramic ones".

KISS.  Keep It Simple Stupid.

After all these years, I have not completely stopped trying to teach people hundreds of recycling rules.

But more than ever I try to teach priorities.

The environmental benefit isn't evenly distributed across every item in your recycling bin.

Some materials matter much more than others.

My wife now does something that makes me smile every time we're in Barcelona.

She routinely reaches into the public litter baskets, rescues aluminum cans, and drops them into the recycling containers located every block or two.

She also no longer feels guilty about throwing away a questionable plastic item.

That's progress.

My ITAD Industry Is Misleading Us about the Dark Web

HIPAA, HDTV, and the Hard Drive: Two 1996 Laws and the Myths They Spawned

Twenty-six years ago I was consulting for the Massachusetts DEP, a couple years removed from being Deputy Division Director, having passed up the Director's chair for a weirder and more interesting assignment: getting the state ready for a wave of cathode ray tubes nobody in government had really priced out yet.

The wave had a birth certificate. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 didn't just deregulate your phone company — it set in motion the reclaiming of analog broadcast spectrum for the wireless industry, which meant every television station in America eventually had to go digital, which meant every television in America was, sooner or later, going to look like a brick next to a flat panel. Add computer monitors following the same LCD gravity, and you had what I'd call an elective upgrade cycle — nothing was actually broken — about to dump tens of millions of perfectly functional CRT TVs and monitors onto a secondary market that had never seen anything like it.  It made possible the critical mass of users who paid for TV broadcasts and internet cable for billions of consumers in the "good enough" or Emerging Market.

"It was Twenty Years Ago Today"

Perfectly functional is the part that got lost. Because a glut of good used electronics is bad news for a specific set of industries: the Planned Obsolescence crowd, who need you buying new; the Big Shred outfits, who get paid by the pound to turn a working monitor into commodity glass and copper; the Haz Waste Disposal industry, which had built permitting and liability empires around leaded glass; and what Peter Buffett labels the charitable-industrial complex, which discovered that "toxic dumping in Africa" made a better fundraising letter than "we shredded a working TV that a family in Lagos would have paid for." Between them, they wrote the overseas dumping narrative — the idea that a container of tested, working CRTs bound for a reuse market overseas was actually poison being smuggled onto a beach. It wasn't nothing — there was real e-waste and real bad actors — but the ratio got inflated by people with a direct financial interest in inflating it, and that ratio became the story.

I bring this up now because the ITAD industry — IT Asset Disposition, the people who take your company's old laptops away — is running a version of the same play today, just with data instead of lead glass. The current bogeyman isn't a container ship, it's the "dark web," and the pitch is the same shape it was in 1999: something terrifying is happening to your stuff after it leaves your hands, and the only responsible answer is destruction, certified, billed by the pound.

HIPAA passed in 1996, the same year as the Telecom Act, and somewhere in its long afterlife it got repurposed as the legal justification for destroying old hard drives, on the theory that deleted health records could be resurrected and sold. That was the story, anyway. The story that didn't get told nearly as loudly was that a wiped hard drive sitting in a ten-year-old PC was also sitting on top of a legitimate Windows license, and often a licensed copy of Intuit, QuickBooks, or MS Office — hundreds of dollars of software the original vendors very much did not want circulating for free on the secondary market. Data destruction as a service solved two problems for two different industries at once, and only one of them had anything to do with your health records.

So here's the question I don't think anyone in the ITAD world wants asked out loud: is there an actual market of people buying decade-old PCs off Goodwill shelves, on the off chance the previous owner forgot to wipe a drive, hoping to find a *.doc file mentioning a diagnosis, so they can resell it on the dark web? Or is the dark web, functionally, 100% populated by data stolen while it was still in active use — phished, breached, skimmed, scraped from a live database — because that's simply where the value is?

I'd put money on the second. Your credit card number is far more likely to walk out the door with a crack-addicted waiter who ran it through a skimmer last Tuesday than with someone who paid forty dollars for your Dell Optiplex at a thrift store and spent a weekend running recovery software on the off chance. But "destroy it anyway, just in case" has been a good business since at least 1996 — first for glass, now for data — and good businesses don't correct their own founding myths.

Which brings me back to the actual thesis, because this isn't the first time this play has been run, and it wasn't invented for the dark web. It was invented — or at least perfected — for HIPAA.

After your hard drive is shredded to little pieces, how do you verify the serial number? Was that 50 hard drives in the shredded pile?  Or was is 49? My industry is increasingly charging you fees to keep that old hard drive info off of the "Dark Web", and we charge $5-15 for a "certificate" for each drive destroyed.  And we have rules on HOW we are allowed to destroy it.

FEAR OF RISK FOR SALE.  Multiple auditors have pointed to our company's pile of hand-disassembled hard drives, the older ones with neodymium magnets, which we take apart by hand... taking them apart by hand recovers valuable gold-bearing circuit boards, platinum platters, and the magnets and aluminum husks, and creates a safe job for differently abled staff we employ from the Counseling Service.  And the serial numbers can be accounted for, still printed on the aluminum backings (unlike a shredded drive). But this "method" wasn't listed by NAID or R2 or whoever, whose standards were transcribed by Blanko or Kobra or Iron Mountain. Multiple auditors point to the platters pictured below, saying that maybe someone will find all the parts and re-assemble these to find out if they were wiped, and sell the data on the Dark Web.

My ITAD industry is hooked on story. Really hooked. It has a monkey on its back, and they won't like this blog. No one is gathering the platters in the photo below to re-construct a hard drive, to see if it was not already wiped, to find current data, about your health information, to sell it to the insurance industry on the dark web. Zero. Big Zero. But every single auditor screams that it's their job to prevent it.

Prevent these "data bearing" disks from being re-assembled to steal your data?  This is like pumping my stomach to put oysters back in their shells and release them back into the wild. I'd need a really heavy dose of something to believe that's a risk.

Hard drive magnets, for sale to the dark web thieves who rebuild obsolete hard drives.