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.
A promising way to direct such revenues is through a blockchain-based refundable deposit system. In this model, minerals extracted from public lands would be “tagged” at the point of production with a small, built-in deposit—funded by the reclaimed royalty stream—that remains associated with the product through its useful life. Blockchain smart contracts would record each unit (e.g., a solar panel, laptop, EV battery) and automatically pay a refund to whoever returns the item for certified reuse or recycling. This prevents fraud, reduces administrative overhead, and ensures transparency: every dollar of royalty-derived subsidy can be traced from the mine to the consumer to the recycler.
The system scales well across global repair networks, allowing technicians in Ghana, Mexico, or Appalachia to scan a panel or device and instantly receive the deposit as a micro-payment.
By linking resource extraction to resource recovery, this approach corrects a historic imbalance. For generations, extraction has been rewarded while circularity has struggled to compete economically with landfilling or informal dumping. Using lost royalties to fund deposits creates a price signal that makes reuse and recycling profitable, even in the most rural or under-resourced regions where formal recycling systems are thin. It also incentivizes manufacturers to design for repairability, because a robust return value on end-of-life devices makes durable, modular products more attractive.
For future generations, the benefits compound. Redirecting extraction subsidies into a transparent blockchain deposit system conserves minerals, reduces the need for new mining, and lowers the ecological footprint of manufacturing. It also builds the infrastructure—financial, digital, and logistical—for a regenerative materials economy, where products are tracked, returned, and recovered rather than abandoned or exported as unmonitored waste. Ultimately, turning 19th-century extraction rules into 21st-century circular-economy tools ensures that the value of America’s public mineral resources is not just taken from the land, but reinvested into leaving the land—and the global commons—better for the generations that follow.