As you rinse those bottles and cans, bag your waste paper and lug out your recycling bin, take heart: In helping the environment, you're also saving some tax money.
But maybe not as much as you'd think.
Though recycling looked like a financial bonanza for local governments just five years ago, Howard County now has to pay processing plants to take its tons of recycled bottles, cans and paper.
The reason: the surprising success of local recycling programs, which now send one out of every four tons of Maryland's household and office trash to a recycling plant, not a landfill. Five years ago, when few governments had large recycling programs, some recycling companies actually paid for used paper, beer bottles and milk jugs.
Now that such material is no longer scarce, the county has to pay $33.66 to get rid of each ton of metal cans mixed with glass and plastic bottles.
It also pays $18.61 per ton to bale mixed paper and send it to a local paperboard factory.
The consolation is that it costs about $60 a ton to bury the same material in the county landfill in Marriottsville.
That all translates into a savings of $900,000 a year for the county's taxpayers, including residents such as Nancy Stefan, a faithful recycler who lives in Wilde Lake village.
"I don't think any of this is a major hassle," said Ms. Stefan, who last Friday had her recyclables left on the curb with an orange sticker because she hadn't packaged them correctly. "I think it's great."
Ms. Stefan and other county residents are still getting used to the procedures demanded by the county's now-mature recycling program, which disposes of 26,000 tons of household trash each year, in addition to the 40,000 tons of waste that private businesses pay to haul away.
Last Friday, for example, she left separate bags of glass bottles, plastic containers and metal cans on the curb in a blue plastic grocery bag, along with a collection of newspapers and other paper in a separate plastic bag.
She didn't know that the containers should be left unsorted and that the paper can't be put in a plastic bag -- guidelines spelled out on the orange sticker the county's waste haulers left on her trash.
This fall, the county started leaving improperly packaged recyclables on the curb with a sticker in order to enforce rules that make the system work more smoothly, said Linda Fields, manager of the county's program.
After losing up to 30 percent of the glass to breakage, for example, officials decided to require that the mixed containers be bundled together in the plastic bags. The plastic bottles cushion the glass, cutting breakage to 1 percent or 2 percent, Ms. Fields said.
And officials told residents not to put paper in plastic bags because "it would go to the mill and gum up the pulper," she said. "We've always asked them to use paper bags, but we used to pick it up even if it was in plastic."
Packaged properly, the material can be turned over to processing plants that recycle the trash into useful products.
One example: the paperboard made from waste paper processed at the Simpkins Industries plant that straddles the Patapsco River between Catonsville and Ellicott City.
The paperboard, similar to that used in cereal boxes, is sold to Harvard Folding Box Co. in Lynn, Mass. The company turns it into "Ideal Box," the trade name for a brand of colorful paperboard gift boxes.
At the Simpkins plant, the county's mixed paper is pushed -- without shredding -- into a huge vat of water that works like a slow-moving blender.
Eventually, the paper turns into a gray-brown mush like lumpy oatmeal and is pumped out through pipes.
The mush is treated with a chemical that kills bacteria and then pumped into a machine that resembles a large printing press, with rollers and wide belts.
The mush sticks to the belts, which squeeze the water through screens on rollers and eventually dry the paperboard while reducing it to the desired thickness.
Occasionally, the paperboard comes out worthless, covered with greasy-looking dark spots.
The spots come from wax used to waterproof meat boxes and drink cartons -- forbidden in any recycling program.
The county is lucky to have Simpkins, which accepts nearly all kinds of paper. Some recycling programs, such as the one in Anne Arundel County, collect only newspapers -- without the Sunday advertising sections.
Simpkins takes the county's paper for free, requiring only that the county bale it, which is done in Elkridge at a recycling plant run by Browning-Ferris Industries Inc.
And Simpkins has tipped off the county to a big potential source of revenue from recycled goods: corrugated cardboard, which is high in the fibers Simpkins needs to make its paperboard.
Simpkins now pays the county $70 a ton for the small amount of corrugated cardboard it collects.
Jeff Lester, purchasing manager for Simpkins Baltimore, says the commodity is so valuable that Simpkins would pay to collect mixed paper and cardboard from businesses just to ensure a steady supply of cardboard.
And what becomes of all the containers that residents recycle?
They go first to the BFI plant in Elkridge, where they are dumped onto a concrete floor -- one reason the county wants glass bottles to be cushioned with plastic bottles.
The containers then are pushed by a front-loader into a pit and hauled by conveyor up to an elevated sorting line.
A vibrating screen conveyor belt then filters out bottle caps, broken glass and anything else less than 2 inches in diameter.
After that, air jets blow the light plastic containers to one side of the belt, where they are sorted by type of plastic.
A worker grabs clear plastic soda and oil bottles and tosses them into a concrete "bunker."
From time to time, a front loader scoops up the plastic containers and puts them on yet another conveyor belt. That belt feeds the containers into a machine that crushes them into one-ton bales, ready for sale.
Back on the sorting line, a magnet picks up steel cans and drops them into yet another bunker. Aluminum cans, meanwhile, are sorted into their processing area by a sophisticated electronic device.
Meanwhile, workers with heavy gloves pick up bottles and large pieces of brown, green and clear glass, putting them onto another conveyor that dumps the glass into bunkers just outside the building.
Because the market is so competitive, BFI is secretive about where it sells its recycled material, much of which has to be further processed before it can be used in new products.
For example, steel cans must have the tin removed before they can be sold to a steelmaker, said Linda Birtel, BFI plant manager. Bethlehem Steel's Sparrows Point plant, with its own de-tinning facility, is one such steel consumer.
Glass is sold to other companies that remove labels, aluminum caps and rings and re-sell ground glass to bottle-makers.
Plastic bottles are turned into pellets and sold to plastics manufacturers, Ms. Birtel said.
And underlying the entire complex recycling process is the cooperation of residents such as Jody Imre, a Wilde Lake resident, who praised the county program and wishes it would go further.
"I wish more of the plastics could be recycled," she said. "Cottage cheese containers, for example. I'd like to be able to recycle more."