How to recycle paper.

You've got a paper bag full of paper ready for recycling. You arrive at one of the drop-off sites, and see two different bins marked "newsprint/paper" and "mixed paper." Then there's one with "cardboard" on it.

What to do?

Here's a quick run-down:

Newsprint and newspaper

This one is pretty easy. Newspaper and newspaper-like newsletters get tossed into this bin, as does phone book paper. This is newsprint, according to Central Management Services:

Newsprint is an uncoated, ground wood paper made by grinding wood into pulp without removing certain components, including lignin. (Lignin remaining in the ground wood paper fiber is what causes newsprint to turn yellow and deteriorate over time.)

Easy, right? Newsprint is probably the top type of paper that's recycled, thanks to newspaper subscriptions.

Mixed paper

This is where things get tricky. Cereal boxes? Mixed paper. Copy machine and printer paper? Mixed paper. Magazines? Mixed paper. Basically, anything that's not newsprint gets thrown into these bins. The kicker is stuff that looks like cardboard - like cereal boxes or six-pack boxes - but isn't really cardboard. Basically, if you can rip it and it doesn't have the corrugation stuff between paper sheets, it's mixed paper.

Corrugated cardboard

Storage boxes, shipping boxes - anything that's corrugated (has the ripples of cardboard in between sheets for strength) counts. One clue is to look at what's already in the bin. If you see a bunch of copy paper boxes, you're good to go. What I like to do is carry my recycling paper IN a cardboard box, dump the paper in the "mixed" bin, and then dump the cardboard box in the "corrugated" bin.

It's not a huge deal if you mix up your paper in the bins, but pre-sorting makes things easier for the hauler - and the less they have to work, the more profitable recycling becomes.

And we all want that.