Michaelle Solages: Paper, plastic, metal. If recycling were only that simple.

Most of us want to recycle correctly. Yet how many of us have stood over a recycling bin holding a plastic takeout container or a bottle cap, wondering, does this actually go in here?

I recently had the opportunity to see what happens after we make that decision. I toured the Sunset Park Materials Recovery Facility in Brooklyn, where much of New York City’s metal, glass and plastic recycling is processed and sorted.

It’s an impressive operation. Magnets separate metals while optical scanners identify different plastics; air jets shoot materials onto their proper conveyor belts; and workers, artificial intelligence and robotic arms provide additional quality control.

Yet my biggest takeaway was that even with all of that advanced technology, recycling is far more complicated than simply dropping an item with a chasing-arrows symbol into a bin. In fact, much of what I learned doesn’t happen in localities across the state.

Take the Town of Hempstead alone. Trash and recycling pickup is not handled by one office. It is divided among the town’s Sanitation Department, a number of sanitary districts and a patchwork of villages, each running its own program with its own rules. A resident of one block may follow completely different recycling instructions than someone a few streets over, simply because they fall in a different district or village. Multiply that across Long Island, and across the state, and it becomes clear why a recycling symbol can only tell you so much.

It’s a hard truth to acknowledge, but the recycling symbol on a piece of packaging doesn’t guarantee that your local municipality can process it. That means a material residents believe is recyclable may actually be treated as regular trash.

The single best thing residents can do is learn their local program’s specific rules rather than relying solely on the symbol.

I learned a few practical lessons that clear up common misconceptions. For instance, avoiding “contamination” doesn’t mean that every container needs to be scrubbed spotless; a little residual peanut butter in a jar is manageable. The bigger issue is putting the wrong materials into the recycling stream altogether. Flexible materials like plastic bags act as “tanglers,” wrapping around sorting machinery and bringing operations to a halt.

Even worse, rechargeable lithium-ion batteries pose a severe fire hazard at waste facilities, and should never be placed in household bins.

Ultimately, the most important lesson from the tour was that better recycling can only take us so far. We often repeat the phrase “reduce, reuse, recycle,” but public conversation tends to focus overwhelmingly on the last word. There’s a reason “reduce” and “reuse” come first. Even after sophisticated machinery successfully sorts our waste, those materials need a destination.

Recycling is an economic market. Some recovered materials have significant value, while others have very little, and prices fluctuate dramatically. Just because a product is technically recyclable doesn’t mean that recycling it is practical or economical.

That means we must address waste before it ever reaches a processing facility. While consumers must recycle correctly and governments must offer clear guidance and infrastructure, responsibility cannot rest on their shoulders alone. It also must extend to the companies producing the waste.

That is the foundation of Extended Producer Responsibility, a policy approach New York has been considering that would require manufacturers to take greater financial and logistical responsibility for the packaging they introduce into our communities. When companies are held accountable for what happens to their packaging at the end of its life, they have a powerful incentive to design products using less material and components that are easier to reuse or recycle.

Touring the Sunset Park facility reinforced that there is no single silver bullet for our waste crisis. We need clearer public education and more robust recycling infrastructure across regions like Long Island, but we must also prioritize reduction and reuse.

Recycling matters, and we should all strive to do it correctly. But the most effective way to manage waste will always be to create less of it in the first place.

Michaelle Solages represents the 22nd Assembly District.