The wire hangers from the dry cleaners pile up in my closet. Are they recyclable?

Oh, how I hate how those pesky hangers scrape up my wooden closet rod.

Then again, I’m also the girl who has thin burgundy hangers for her tops; thick burgundy hangers for her pants; “huggable hangers” for clothes that slip easily off of regular plastic hangers; thin, white hangers for her summer clothing; and both thin and thick white hangers for her husband’s clothes — in a different section from the summer clothing hangers. (God forbid hubby’s and my clothes blend in inside the closet. I can just see him now, wearing my coral-colored Banana Republic blouse by accident.)

I have also installed a light on each side of the closet to further facilitate clothes retrieval. Finally, my clothing is organized by color and type. Yes, I have a sickness. I think it’s called obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In other words, wire hangers cannot call my closet “home sweet home.” The armoire upstairs, however, houses our dry cleaned clothing and so, warmly opens its double doors to these previously rejected (by me) hangers.

So, what to do with the hangers the rest of the world doesn’t want?

Actually, the rest of the world does want them.

Rather than recycling the hangers by throwing them in your big blue bin, however, it is strongly suggested to take them back from whence they came — the cleaners.

Alonso Corona, general manager and vice president of Greene’s Cleaners in Napa, estimates that more than 40 percent of the hangers they use have been used before. “The demand is so high (in terms of returned hangers) that we use a special-needs program, sponsored by the state of California that sorts the hangers for us,” he says. How’s that for going green (pun intended)?

A spokesman for River Park Cleaners said they, too, take back hangers for reuse.

Fran Johnson, administrative assistant for the Drycleaning & Laundry Institute, a trade group for the dry cleaning industry in Laurel, Md., said the organization also encourages dry cleaning plants to reuse hangers, rather than recycle them. “The plants will reuse them.” If not, she said, the hangers “are recyclable and can be melted down like regular metal.”

If you don’t make it back to the dry cleaners, or don’t wish to, you can, in fact, toss those hangers in your recycling bin.

But please, not by ones and twos.

Kevin Miller, recycling manager for Napa Recycling and Waste Services, said the hangers can be trouble. “It’s tricky with hangers getting caught up in the screen that separates paper from metal. We run into this with plastic bags as well. In our sorting screen, a paper bag is like a string or a rubber band going into the rollers of a vacuum. It just gets bound up,” he said.

Miller said it would be best to stack the hangers into a large, neat pile and then bind them with one wire to make it easier for the human sorters to remove it before the stack reaches the sorting machine.

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