Reduce, Reuse, Recycle your way to a greener life
(if you live in the Los Angeles area, see my LA-specific post on recent recycling initiatives.)
There is probably no clearer sign of the negative impact modern life has on the planet than the amount of trash we create just by living. At 1,609 pounds of trash annually per person, the United States is the #1 producer of trash in the world. Fortunately, there are many ways to lower your trash output, and the 3Rs, reduce, reuse, recycle, are key to this effort.
One thing to note is that the 3Rs are in a hierarchical order in terms of importance. Reducing is the highest impact way to reduce your impact on the earth, reusing is next and recycling is last (important, but not as impactful as reducing or reusing.) So, on to the steps:
The first step is to reduce your consumption by buying fewer products or choosing products with less packaging thereby reducing waste. The second step is to reuse, repair or repurpose products to extend their life-span such as using an old car tire as a funky planter in your garden. The third “r” is recycle which means “to process materials that would otherwise be considered waste into raw materials and new products” such as turning a glass bottle into a glass tile. Recycling is in some ways the most difficult of the “Rs” because it can be hard to find recycling plants locally for every product, but recycling is even more important now than ever before because:
- By recycling we are saving the energy needed to obtain and process “virgin” raw materials. For instance it takes less energy to recycle an aluminum can than to go out and mine the metal. Also, as materials get harder to obtain it’ll be even more important to recycle. A single ton of junked PCs has more gold than 17 tons of ore.
- We are running out of landfills, and as landfills fill-up it means we need to transport our trash farther and farther away which wastes gas and adds to carbon dioxide emissions (a leading cause of global warming.)
Besides these important reasons to recycle, there are some staggering statistics about what we throw away:
- The world’s largest manmade object is the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island
- Every three months American landfill enough aluminum to rebuild our entire commercial airfleet
- Making paper from recycled paper reduces contributions to air pollution by 95%
- Recycling a stack of newspaper 3 feet tall saves a tree
- Making products from recycled reduces contributions to water pollution by 50%
But what’s recyclable? Well, some items are fairly straight forward to recycle: aluminum and tin cans, glass bottles and newspapers are recyclable just about everywhere in the U.S. Some cities have recycle bins that get picked up with the trash, in other cities you have to take these items to a local grocery store or community college for drop-off. But without a doubt, these items are easily recyclable and if you take them to a location like a grocery store you can often get cash back for these items. Other items that are easily recycled if you have a local Home Depot or Target are compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs), which should never be thrown away because they contain a small amount of mercury and rechargeable batteries (including laptop and cell-phone batteries). Simply take CFLs and rechargeable batteries to your local Home Depot or Target and ask where their drop-off point is. Also, most “shipping stores” will take clean styrofoam peanuts off your hands.
However, some statistics estimate that about 75% of what is thrown away can be recycled, but since recycling happens at the city level the rules for what can be recycled are different for everyone. Some cities such as Los Angeles have curbside recycling programs that take back all plastics and even styrofoam, in addition to the usual metal/glass/paper, so it is possible to recycle these items on a large scale and if your town or city doesn’t’ have a recycling program, write to your mayor or councilperson to push for one.
Fortunately, there are a few good resources that can help you sort out what you can recycle (or donate for reuse) and how. Almost anything from prom dresses to make-up has a way of avoiding the landfill so keep these websites on-hand for future reference. And if you don’t find what you need here, try listing your item as “free” on an on-line resource such as craigslist.org. You can give away just about anything using craigslist.org, which is completely free to use for this sort of thing.
As with all steps to lead a “greener” life, take it one step at a time. Start with the “easy” items such as aluminum/glass/newspaper and step by step you can start reducing your trash even more. Eventually you’ll find that the vast majority of your “trash” is able to be recycled, reused or repurposed in some way and you can feel good about the fact that you are making a real impact on reducing your “footprint” on the planet and leaving your children and grandchildren a planet worth living on!
RESOURCES:
National Recycling Coalition: interactive map listing state recycling resources
http://www.nrc-recycle.org/localresources.aspx
COOP America’s “21 things you didn’t know you could recycle” guide
http://www.coopamerica.org/pubs/caq/articles/21Things.cfm
LIME media guide to “how to recycle everything.” Includes many great resources for organizations that take donations of everything from old prom dresses to eyeglasses.
http://www.lime.com/features/limes_guide_to_recycling
SOURCES:
http://www.epa.gov/epaoswer/non-hw/muncpl/recycle.htm#Figures
http://www.nrc-recycle.org/
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