Hello neighbors, I wrote a while back with questions about plastic recycling. Thank you to the many people that responded! A lot of folks asked me to share what I found. TL;DR 1. Michaels is the only plastic recycler I could find in the area and unfortunately they won't share what they do with it. The reason I asked was that I wanted to get something started -- a co-op, nonprofit, business or loose collection of neighbors -- to collect plastics and other hard-to-recycle items in Highland Park and bring them to get recycled. I'm not willing to do that without even a small assurance that the plastic is actually being recycled (or potentially, reused). 2. I did stumble on a place relatively close that recycles food cartons -- like milk, soup and bean cartons. I've toyed with the idea of trying to find 12 Highland Park households who are interested in recycling food cartons -- we could each take one month a year to drive our combined cartons out. I'm only slightly enthusiastic about the idea because my household doesn't happen to use a lot of food cartons... Longer version I had to email folks at Michael Brothers five or six times to get a response. I was eventually told that they sort and bale the plastics before selling them to a company that remakes the plastic into other plastic products and that Michaels was unable to tell me who that company is. I told Michaels why I was asking -- that I wanted to get together with neighbors in Highland Park to recycle plastics that the city doesn't take -- but that given the many headlines about plastics ending up in landfills, I needed more information into what would happen to the plastics we might drop off. He said that he couldn't share more "due to agreements and business relationships with our partners." At risk of appearing argumentative, I politely pressed him on the matter -- I can't imagine a business reason for secrecy in this scenario (can you? I'd be glad to entertain theories.). Given the headlines, it seems to me that secrecy would only exacerbate mistrust in plastic recycling. Alas, I didn't get any additional insight. I spoke with a number of people not associated with Michael Brothers who said that Michael's sells their plastic to HydroBlox. It's possible that's true and that's who the guy I corresponded with was referring to. I'd like to know for sure, in part because there are questions about whether HydroBlox do harm to the soil that they sit in. But in my mind, there's no reason for me to go down that rabbit hole if I don't even know if that's where Michael Brothers plastics go. I'm disappointed and frustrated, like a lot of people... I've switched modes to trying a lot harder to eliminate single use plastics from my shopping cart (do you all know about the Refillery? And Sol Refill?). It's tough to completely eliminate plastic! But I suppose even making a dent helps.