Can you recycle bubble wrap?
Usually no
Not in your curbside bin, but yes at a store drop-off, where it goes in the same bin as plastic bags. Pop the air out first and pull off any tape or labels.
Follow it down the line
Three different questions hide inside "is this recyclable?", and the answer can change at each step.
The material · Yes
Is the material recyclable?
Bubble wrap, air pillows and the rest of what gets sold as bubble packaging are polyethylene film, the same family as grocery bags, and they go through the same recovery route. There is a national drop-off network specifically for this material, running to thousands of retail locations. The recyclers' current design guidance treats every grade of PE film as preferred material, and it says where the material comes from: residential postconsumer film is collected primarily at retail locations, mostly grocery stores. Bubble wrap is not an awkward exception to the bag stream. It is the bag stream. Purity is the constraint that decides individual items. Film that is more than 90 percent PE by weight is the preferred case, and 80 to 90 percent has to be tested before anyone will call it recyclable. Density is the mechanism behind that: reclaimers separate film in float-sink tanks, PE floats, and film dense enough to sink instead becomes waste at the very plant meant to recycle it. That is why a paper-lined bubble mailer is a genuinely different object from a sheet of bubble wrap. The paper is not a label to be overlooked, it is a second material bonded to the first, and the two do not come apart again on the way in. What the film becomes is concrete rather than notional. Once converted to recycled resin it goes into new film and bags and into durable goods like plastic decking, which is what the retail take-back programs feed.
Sources: Association of Plastic Recyclers: PE Flexible design guidance, Association of Plastic Recyclers: Are you recycling your bag full of bags?
The facility · No
Will a sorting facility recover it?
Film is the wrong shape for a sorting line in the most literal sense: it has almost no weight relative to its area, so the air handling that separates light material from heavy sends it everywhere except where it should go. It lifts off conveyors, wraps around rotating screens, and stops the line. Fort Collins puts it plainly, that bubble wrap should not be included in curbside recycling because it can damage equipment at the sorting plant, and that substantial quantities of it can cause entire loads of recyclables to be discarded. This is the same failure that keeps plastic bags out of curbside bins, for the same mechanical reason, and there is a measure of what it costs. When the Recycling Partnership surveyed its MRF working group across 37 facilities, plastic film and bags came out as the top-ranked contaminant of the ten identified, and accounted for 24 percent of the entire cost of contamination on their own, counted across disposal, lost value of other recyclables, labor, equipment repair and wear, facility downtime and staff injury. Bubble wrap is not a marginal member of that category. It is the category.
Sources: City of Fort Collins recycling guide: bubble wrap and air pillows, The Recycling Partnership: 2017 Costs of Contamination, MRF Working Group Survey
Your curbside program · Rarely
Will your curbside program take it?
Essentially no curbside program accepts it. Municipal guides that list it at all list it in order to say no, and to point at store drop-off instead. Omaha tells residents plainly not to place air pillows or bubble wrap in the city's curbside carts or its drop-off site containers, and offers reuse first, then a retail film take-back program, then the garbage. East Lansing excludes bags and film for the same mechanical reason and asks for recyclables loose in the cart rather than bagged inside one. The pattern here is worth noticing, because it is not the usual local variation. On most items the three layers disagree and the answer really does depend on where you live. On this one they line up: the material is genuinely recyclable, the facility genuinely cannot handle it, and essentially every program routes it to the same place. Bubble wrap is one of the few items on this site where the curbside answer is the same everywhere, and where the drop-off answer is the real one rather than a consolation.
Sources: Omaha Recycling Guide: air pillows and bubble wrap, City of East Lansing: plastic bags and plastic film
What you need to do
- Pop or deflate air pillows so they take less space in the collection bin
- Peel off tape and shipping labels
- Separate any paper or bubble-lined kraft mailers; those are a composite and go elsewhere
- Keep it clean and dry
- Stretchy and filmy passes; rigid or crinkly does not. If it crackles rather than stretches it is probably not PE
Where else it can go
Store drop-off with plastic bags
The working route, and the one the recycling industry built for this material rather than a fallback. Bubble wrap, air pillows, mailers and grocery bags all go into the same collection bin at the front of most large grocery and retail chains, and what it gathers becomes new film or composite decking.
Remove tape, shipping labels and any paper or cardboard. Mixed materials get the whole batch downgraded or rejected.
Reuse it
Bubble wrap survives many uses, and independent pack-and-ship shops will often take clean wrap and pillows off your hands rather than buy new. Reuse skips the reprocessing entirely, which is worth more than recycling on every measure.
Call ahead; they may already have plenty, and shops differ on whether they will take pillows as well as sheet wrap.
Deflate before you do anything
Air pillows are mostly air, and a collection bin fills with air long before it fills with polyethylene. Popping or slitting them costs nothing and multiplies what the bin can hold, which is the same economics that make foam so hard to collect.
Common mistakes
- Putting it in the curbside bin because it is obviously plastic
- Leaving the shipping label on, which makes it a mixed material
- Including paper-and-bubble mailers, which cannot be separated back into their layers
- Assuming the drop-off bin is only for grocery bags. Bubble wrap, air pillows and case wrap belong in exactly the same bin, and the network exists because of them as much as the bags
- Carting whole inflated pillows to the store. They are almost entirely air, and a full bin of them holds very little of the material anyone wanted