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We all want to think that we’re doing something good for the environment by recycling. However, the act of recycling can be a little more difficult than just putting your plastics inside the bin and calling it a day – especially when it comes to the more difficult items to recycle, like sauce packets.

How many times have we gone to Taco Bell only to end up with a large handful of their little sauce packets? Sure, we’ll probably use one or two while enjoying a Crunch Wrap Supreme or some tacos. But overall, most of them usually end up in a random kitchen drawer next to some batteries or stuffed into our car’s middle console.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Often, they’ll just sit there for months until we find them and decide to use them on a random meal. But most of the time, we usually just toss them out anyways.

Given that they often end up in the trash, it comes as no surprise that 8 billion of the little plastic sauce packets end up inside landfills annually.

Photo: flickr/Rachel Kramer Bussel

While the Taco Bell sauce packs might be something that ends up in the garbage, the company of Taco Bell has a new solution. Taco Bell has announced it will be partnering with TerraCycle – a company known for recycling hard-to-recycle items – in order to create a program that allows its customers to return their sauce packs.

The concept is quite simple as well. All it requires is going to the Taco Bell website and creating an account with the Sauce Packet Recycling Pilot Program. You can then place them into a box, and once the box is full, you just print off a label provided by TerraCycle in order to get free shipping, and voila! You can send them back.

Photo: flickr/Tony Webster

As the website states, “Recycling just got saucy.”

Once received, the recycling company will clean out the sauce packs, then melt them down in order to form plastic that then goes on to be used in a bunch of other items.

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So, guess now we can feel a little less guilty about all those sauce packets lying around.

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