The town I live in is moving to single stream recycling in July. This is good news for lazy people like me who can never seem to properly dispose of mixed paper, cardboard and other items that couldn’t go into the blue bin for curbside pick-up. Now, someone else will have the burden of sorting through all my household recyclables.
This month, I brushed up on my recycling ABC’s by offering to help with a second grade environmental education program in the schools (clearly they don’t screen presenters, though they did pair me up with a seasoned co-presenter). I learned along with the second graders as I read from the script. At the end of one presentation, a student came up to me and confided that her mom only recycles bottles and never uses reusable grocery bags. I thought maybe if people, like her mom, knew a few easy tips for recycling, they’d be inclined to do more. Here are a few tips from the script – some I knew and some I didn’t:
Buy glass. Glass is made from a plentiful natural resource, sand, and can be melted down and reused many, many times. When there is a choice, purchase glass containers. Just remind yourself that plastic is made from oil. This alone makes me think twice about buying food products in it.
Rinse it out, but don’t worry about the label. Cleaner recycling is better recycling. Rinse out those pasta jars before putting them in the blue bin. The good news is that you don’t need to worry about the paper labels. They are burned off during the recycling process.
Make it part of your wardrobe. My co-presenter toted groceries for our demonstration in a beautiful, large, light weight bag – much more chic than any of the reusable shopping bags I’ve seen. I looked at the tag and saw it was made by Envirosax. Once home, I found 5-packs of these fashionable bags on Overstock.com and Amazon.com. I have no problem walking into Target or A&P with one of these around my arm.
Toss the caps. Bottle caps are not made with clean materials that can be burned down and recycled. Toss them out so they don’t contaminate a load.
Buy big. Buy cereal in a bigger box. Pick snacks in one large bag, instead of 12 individually wrapped snack packs. Choices like these reduce the amount of waste there is to be tossed or recycled. I have to confess that there are times when those individually packaged snacks come in handy, like this week, when I’m taking in chocolate pudding cups with gummy worms for my son’s class of 20 kids.
Reuse your plastics. According to the script, plastic bottles can’t be melted down to make new plastic bottles, so try to reuse and not recycle plastic when you can. One student raised her hand during our presentation to tell me about her new Bobble – a reusable water bottle, complete with a filter. She said she’s even used it to purify lake water. Though I bought a set of Bobbles for my kids to take to school and sports practice, the package didn’t say anything about purifying lake water. But I’m happy to use it on our local tap water.
Get your priorities straight. Though it’s important to recycle everything you can, some materials are more precious than others. Bauxite (which is used to make aluminum) is a limited resource that is very difficult to extract from the Earth. Since aluminum is easy to recycle again and again, remember to rinse off those metals and pop them in the blue bin!
Turn off your car during idle moments. Apparently, a rule of thumb is that if your car is idling for more than 30 seconds, you should turn it off. You’ll save more gas this way. So, when you’re waiting in the pick-up line at school, turn off your car and pull out a library book.
Recycle your sneakers. I’m good at saving my family’s old clothes and either giving them to friends and family or donating them to charity. However, our sneakers never tend to have a second life left in them. Nike collects old tennis shoes and turns them into new shoes or new sports fields. If you can get your sneakers to a Nike store, it’s a good way for them to go. Our town even has a tennis shoe collection day.
Get your kids involved. With the busy-ness of everyday life with three kids and a husband who travels for work, I can use all the help I can get. The more my kids know, the more they can help out (like drinking from the Bobble instead of a juice box). One tip from the script was to take soda cans to a recycling center at the grocery store instead of putting them out with your recycling. The cans get sliced at the recycling center and take up one tenth of the space of the cans that are picked up curbside. Collecting cans to drop off at the A&P is not something I am motivated to do, but when my kids learned about the $.05 reward for each can, they were happy to fill up a garbage bag and accompany me to the store. Once there, they helped me pick out snacks in a big bag, too.
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