If your peanut butter jar is giving you eco-guilt, Michael J. Coren at the Washington Post has a blunt answer: scrape, don't scrub. In his "Climate Coach" column, Coren uses that sticky container to explain what's working—and what's not—in US recycling. While Germany manages to recycle around two-thirds of its municipal trash, the United States is stuck near a quarter, with most waste still burned or buried. One bright spot: facilities like Minneapolis-based Eureka Recycling, where advanced machines and optical sensors sort more than 1,000 items a minute, turning a heap of mixed cans, bottles, and paper into clean bales that manufacturers actually want. "I'd love it if people put more things into the recycling bin," says Miriam Holsinger, Eureka's COO. "Half of recycling is going into the trash."
You don't need to overthink it, Holsinger tells Coren. "Just use a rubber spatula," she says. "Honestly, I give mine to my dog and let him worry about it until I put it in the recycling bin." Coren walks readers through a peanut butter jar's path: from curbside bin, past workers yanking out hoses and diapers, through ballistic separators and lasers that "see" plastic types, to reclaimers that wash and shred it into something new. He also tracks bigger shifts—state laws forcing packaging makers to pay, AI systems cataloging billions of waste items a day, and companies redesigning packaging to be recyclable from the start. For the tour—and the nuance behind that quick scrape advice—read the full piece in the Washington Post.
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