Say you consider yourself a top-notch recycler. You buy in bulk as much as possible, compost all your food scraps, can recite the recyclables bin allowable item list from memory. When trash day rolls around, what's in your discounted black mini-can?

According to Sunset Scavenger Spokesman Robert Reed, San Francisco residents should have nothing but "film plastics" (like plastic bags from stores and dry cleaners) and polystyrene, aka Styrofoam.

But the life of a recycling ascetic ain't easy. First of all, it means learning the rules of your particular community, since recycling practices vary depending on where you live. Probably, It means forgoing juice boxes, disposable diapers, complicated, multi-material packaging. It means you've scraped out your cat food cans ("contaminated" recyclables are often tossed). If you're a paper shredder, you've put all the scraps into a paper bag labeled "shredded paper." (Tiny pieces of paper are too hard to collect – sorters usually landfill them.) In short, you've earned a PhD in recycling. (And if you think that's complicated, consider the Japanese.)

Some experts have argued that this is all too much trouble – that instead of aiming for zero waste, we should accept a certain amount of landfilling. Others say that the more citizens recycle, the more efficient the program becomes – hence the movement toward mandatory recycling. One point that nearly everyone seems to agree on is that products on the shelves must be designed to be more easily recyclable than they are today.

Is This Recyclable?

On that note, we interviewed two recycling experts: Mark Murray, director of Californians Against Waste, and Kurt Standen (no relation, amazingly to both of us), general manager of the Sacramento Recycling and Transfer Station. We came armed with six recycling stumpers, including a rubber boot, a juice box, and that much-maligned item of transport, the plastic bag. See what Standen and Murray had to say by clicking on the images below.

Listen to the Getting to Zero Waste radio report online.

Humans produce 500 billion plastic bags annually.

In China, they recently banned it. Australia, Bangladesh, Ireland, Italy, South Africa,Taiwan, Mumbai and India have either banned it or discouraged its use by raising taxes. And on March 27, 2007, San Francisco became the first city in the USA to ban it from large grocery stores.

More people are ditching plastic bags on a local and national level with good reason: we produce about 500 billion plastic bags world-wide, and less than one percent of that is recycled.

A recent QUEST report shows that plastic bottles are straining our environment, too: each year the USA alone produces 50 billion plastic bottles. Some would say to switch from plastic to paper bags – but reports show that paper bags aren't the most sustainable solution.

Plastic can have a longer shelf-live than humans do: it can persist in the environment for anywhere between 20 to 1,000 years. But a 16-year-old from Waterloo, Canada figured out to decompose it in only six weeks.

Daniel Burd, a student at Waterloo Collegiate Institute, discovered the key to decomposing plastic bags for a school science fair. Needless to say, he won.

"Almost every week I have to do chores and when I open the closet door, I have this avalanche of plastic bags falling on top of me," said Burd to The Record, a Waterloo newspaper. "One day, I got tired of it and wanted to know what other people are doing with these plastic bags."

First, Burd decided to isolate the microbes that break down plastic in polyethelene plastic bags. Burd ground plastic bags into powder and created a solution to break it down using tap water and yeast. Six weeks later, he found that the plastic weighed 17 percent less than the control group.

Burd then isolated the effective strains that caused the degradation – Sphingomonas and Pseudomonas – and tried the experiment again, adding sodium acecate.

Six weeks later – as opposed to 1,000 years – the plastic decomposed by 43 percent.

For his final report, Plastic Not Fantastic, Burd wrote that his process of polyethylene degradation can be used for large-scale plastic bag biodegradation.

"As a result, this would save the lives of millions of wildlife species and save space in landfills," wrote Burd.