Despite the fact that we’ve successfully brought our recyling-to-trash ratio down two-to-one, with my husband proudly lugging the bulging blue bin down to the street on Tuesdays while I tag behind with the veritably anorexic black trash can, I have the sinking suspicion that not everything I’m throwing in the recycling can is, in fact, recyclable.

My view towards separating trash has up until now been pretty black or white. Is it plastic, metal, glass or paper? Toss it in the blue bin. Is it vegetable or plant? Compost it. Everything else gets trashed.

The foil yogurt top? Recycling. The empty shampoo container? Crumpled up wax paper sandwich bags, plastic shopping bags, empty soy milk Tetrapaks, water bottles (with tops), the plastic wrap on my mother-in-law’s famous cranberry relish? Blue bin, baby.

And despite the fact that the recycling market tanked in tandem with the economy, with cardboard that sold for $135 a ton in September now going for $35 a ton, plastic bottles from $.25 to $.2 a pound, and aluminum cans from $.80 to $40 a pound, according to the Associated Press, until Los Angeles County suspends our recycling program because they’ve got no where to sell this stuff, I’m still at it.

A few weeks ago, I lugged home the empty plastic water bottles from my son’s soccer games to recycle them. I see empty soda bottles in public trash cans and wish that I had a bag. I fear I’m becoming a wee bit obsessed.

But I have issues: What if those items I’m so painstakingly rinsing out and saving for the bin don’t actually qualify as recyclables? What if I’m just delaying their final journey to the landfill? And what if by sending non-recyclables to the recycling plant, I’m actually costing the workers there time (and, by extension, money in the form of my tax dollars) by making them weed the stuff out?

So I checked in with Earth911.com, which provided the lovely crumpled plastic bottle photo pictured above, and is my go-to source for facts like:

•Eight out of 10 plastic water bottles end up in the landfill, where they don’t even start breaking down for 700 years.
•Nail polish is considered hazardous waste, and should never be thrown in the trash.
•Cell phones, computers and televisions can be recycled.
•As of last month, the city of San Diego recycles surfboards. Dude!

I was determined to find out exactly what goes where.

Right off the bat, they made it easy. I typed in “aluminum foil” and my zip code and found that, yes indeed-y, my yogurt top belongs in the blue bin. Same for the empty shampoo bottle, since it’s got a “2″ on the bottom, meaning it’s HDPE clear plastic. And ditto for those wax paper bags and bottles (I need to take the caps off, since they’re different kinds of plastic).

The Tetrapak is another case entirely. Can’t be recycled. End of story. (And of my purchasing.)

But those plastic shopping bags and plastic wrap? Apparently, I should be taking that stuff to the supermarket recycling bin, since they’re light enough to fly around and clog up the curbside recycling equipment. Thank god I’ve always got an Envirosax in my purse.

Yes I am a trash geek.