Overview

I was sitting at my desk with my monitor obviously displaying moneygreenlife.com. I was working on fine-tuning my earlier post on programmable thermostats when I looked outside my window and noticed that almost every house in my block had recycle bins placed outside their curbs along with their regular garbage. It pleased me to see so many people recycling nowadays. Then it dawned on me that I don’t own a recycle bin myself! I immediately went to they county’s website and discovered that I can pick up a free bin at the nearest recycling center. I plan on picking one up during one of these days soon.

Facts and figures

Wherever you go nowadays, whether it’s an office building, mall, or convention centers, you can probably find a recycling bin sitting next to the typical trash bins. People are learning to recycle more and more every day and rightly so. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, a typical person produces about 4.4 pounds of garbage every day or 1,600 pounds a year. If you do the math, the numbers can be extraordinary. There are approximately 250 million adults living in the United States. That equates to 40,000,000,000 (40 billiion) pounds of trash generated ever year. This is a conservative estimate because people under the age of 18 produce trash as well. Where do all this trash go? Some are recycled and used to make something else, some are burned and converted to biogas (renewable energy), and most are just buried in the landfills!!

I already do recycle

Since almost 75% Americans recycle on a regular basis, most likely, you belong to that category as well. Even though more and more people are participating in recycling programs, still only 30% of the total trash is recycled. 15% is burned, leaving 55% of the total trash getting buried in the landfill! We can do better as 80% of what we throw away are recyclables, and only 30% are being recycled. This means that our landfills can be reduced by 50% if we maximize our recycling habits.

It’s ok, I can’t save the world by recycling more

I found some interesting tidbits at ecocycle.org, an organization devoted to recycling.

1. Americans throw away enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial fleet of airplanes every 3 months.
2. Recycling creates 6 times as many jobs as landfilling.
3. Recycling glass instead of making it from silica sand reduces mining waste by 70%, water use by 50%, and air pollution by 20%.
4. If we recycled all of the newspapers printed in the U.S. on a typical Sunday, we would save 550,000 trees–or about 26 million trees per year.
5. The energy saved each year by steel recycling is equal to the electrical power used by 18 million homes each year.
6. If every household in the U.S. replaced just one roll of 1,000 sheet virgin fiber bathroom tissues with 100% recycled ones, we could save: 373,000 trees, 1.48 million cubic feet of landfill space, and 155 million gallons of water. You can find more tidbits at ecocycle.org. Yes, you certainly can make a difference!

Contact your local recycling center

Recycling is so much easier today than it was 20 years ago. It seems like you can find recycling bins sitting next to the typical trash bins everywhere you go these days. I was at my local mall the other day and noticed two more bins next to the typical trash bin. One for paper, another for plastic and glass, and another for regular trash. My local county makes it real easy for me to recycle as well. First they give out free recycling bins for me to use. Once a week, a recycling collection truck comes to our neighborhood and picks up the recyclables. (They send a different collection truck to pick up my trash. ) I place my recyclables in my free recycling bin and they take it. I don’t even have to sort them. I just place them all in there without a single worry.

They have the following instructions posted on their website:

• Put all recycling into the same container, no need to separate.
• You don’t need to rinse or clean recycling and you can include labels, caps and lids.
• You may put out an unlimited amount of recycling.
• Use the yellow recycling container or any other container of your choice marked with a large ‘X’.
• Place large recycling items next to your recycling container.
• When in doubt, place the item in your recycling container and we will handle it!

They also listed all the items that can be placed inside the free recycle bin to be collected by the recycling collection agency:

Paper

• Milk and juice carton/boxes
• cardboard
• boxes (cereal, cracker, pizza, etc)
• books
• paper
• newspaper and inserts
• magazines and catalogs
• junk mail
• file folders
• envelopes

Metal

• aluminum foil and pans
• aluminum cans
• tin/steel cans
• empty aerosol cans

Plastic

• plastic bags and shrink wrap
• plastic cups, plates, utensils
• plastic buckets
• storage totes
• plastic flower pots
• plastic furniture
• trash cans and old recyclying containers
• plastic toys, pools, playsets
• bottles, jars, jugs, tubs, and trays

Glass

• All glass and jars

Please check with your local recycling center to inquire about their recycling program. Additionally, if you have old compact fluorescent light bulbs, please contact your local recycling center for special handling instructions.