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Here is a quick primer from a Slate/Washington Post article on some of the tricky questions about what can be recycled and what cannot.

First of all, it may be helpful to understand how the paper recycling process works. It goes something like this:

When bales of sorted paper arrive at a mill, they’re fed into a huge, blenderlike contraption along with water and chemicals. The resulting pulp goes through a number of purification steps. First, a long chain called a ragger is lowered into the swirling mixture; things such as twine and wire wrap around the chain and get pulled out. A metal screen at the bottom of the pulper picks out more contaminants — this should be when your plastic window fragments are removed. Next, the slurry is spun around in a cone-shaped hydrocyclone — which separates out higher-density items such stones and bits of metal (including staples) — and then it’s screened again through a finer mesh. Finally, if the pulp is being made into high-quality product such as white office paper, air bubbles and detergents are pumped in to wash away unwanted ink particles.

Now, how about some of those hard to answer questions that come up when sorting the recycling? The article provides the following answers.

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