The trash from our meals is piling up. For starters, supermarket goods are hitting the shelves in increasingly elaborate packaging—think soup pouches, snack packs, and squeeze tubes. Meanwhile, booming on-demand food delivery services leave behind an ever-growing trail of containers and plastic debris.

The good news is that more and more cities and towns, from Boise, Idaho, to Atlanta, Georgia, offer curbside recycling pickup—but the proliferation of packaging has made it more confusing than ever to determine what you should actually put in the blue bin.

So which containers and wrappers should you throw in the trash? The answer depends largely on where you live, but some kinds of packages more than likely will go straight from the blue bin into the landfill. Yes, many of these items are theoretically recyclable, but with the exception of a handful of cities with very sophisticated recycling centers (San Francisco, for example) the vast majority of municipalities can’t process most of them. According to the recycling experts I talked to, if you want to reduce your waste, your best bet is to avoid buying these items in the first place if you can—or at the very least check if your local facility accepts them before attempting to recycle them.

1. Mesh bags for citrus fruits

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2. Plastic “clam shell” containers for take-out and produce