(Inquirer photo by Charles Fox)

In this morning's paper, I wrote about how Blue Mountain, the city's recycling facility works.  The place is a maze of moving parts -- conveyor belts, spinning discs, you name it. The place would be perfect for the final movie scene where James Bond gets in his daredevil hand-to-hand fight with the bad guy. 

The story included a list of what to recycle and what not to recycle. But what if you still don't know? Nina Shen Rastogi, who writes "The Green Lantern," an environmental Q&A column for the online magazine, Slate, recently took up the question. 

Obviously, if you don't know, the first thing is to try to find out by going to the city's recycling website, www.PhillyRecyclingPays.com.  But if you're still in doubt: Throw it out. 

"In the moderately bad scenario, the offending item gets weeded out by the recycling facility's sorters, in which case it will be landfilled or incinerated—exactly what would have happened if you'd thrown it in the trash in the first place, except for the extra money and fuel spent on its roundabout journey," Rastogi writes.
 

"In the worst-case scenario, the interloper either damages equipment or ruins a batch of otherwise valuable material."

You can read the full article here.