Yes, even your crayons can be recycled!
Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their lives in order to gradually green their lives.
||Week Eight||
This week’s green life project action item is to find one or more odd item you normally throw into the garbage and begin recycling it.
You’re reading about helping to improve your envirohuman impact and I suspect that you already recycle some things. Most likely, you recycle such items as glass, metal cans, paper and cardboard, and plastic. If you are not already doing that, please join in because those tend to be the simple ones!
We’re not going to concentrate on the simple stuff that you can recycle in this article. Rather, let’s take a look at some of the small pieces of trash in your life that you could be recycling but maybe didn’t know that you could.
We create mounds of plastic, metal, paper, and plastic waste (okay, so, “mounds,” is an understatement) but there are so many other sundry items your everyday recycler may not accept but that you could be giving a second life to by sending to a special recycler.
Recycling even the various items that may seem as if they cannot be recycled helps preserve needed resources while saving on the energy needed to extract those materials from the environment. It also keeps what can be reused as resources from becoming pollutants in the environment and puts them back into usable products.
Go ahead, choose something from the list and begin recycling today!
- Wine Corks: A while back, we highlighted that you can recycle your wine corks through both TerraCycle and Yemm and Hart. So if you or your friends drink wine, start collecting the corks (of course, recycle the bottle through your conventional recycler) and send them in to give them a second life!
- CDs and CD cases: We also recently wrote about recycling your CDs and CD cases. You’re bound to have plenty of old CDs, be it music you no longer care for or old software, start sending them and their cases in here.
- Cell Phones: Look online for myriad places to recycle your old cellular phones, which can add to plastic waste and leach harmful contaminants, like lead, into soil and water tables. Many non-profits (such as this one) collect them and turn them in to recyclers for small amounts of cash.
- Compact Fluorescent Light Bulbs: Definitely recycle your CFL bulbs (the ones we told you to begin using last week) at Home Depot stores. The bulbs contain mercury, which can contaminate our soil, water, and air. Just remember that CFL bulbs reduce the amount of mercury that is in our air because they reduce the amount of electricity our many mercury-belching power plants need to produce.
- Crayons: Recycle old crayons by either melting them down yourself (could be messy, I have never attempted this) or by sending them to Crazy Crayons.
- Batteries: Hopefully, you’re using rechargeable batteries by now. Your mobile devices have them and those can be recycled. If you haven’t begun using rechargeable everyday AA and AAA batteries, definitely make this money- and environment-saving investment. Eventually, rechargeable batteries do wear out and you can recycle them here.
- Wrappers and more: Look at the list of stuff Terracycle is currently recycling on their site! Join in!
Check out that list! Seven specific things you can begin recycling. You can get started today with that old cellular phone you have been hanging onto or your wine corks. Think of the reduction in waste being sent to landfills if we all began recycling increasing numbers of such bits and bobs listed above!
Some of these items, like the CFL bulbs and the rechargeable batteries, take a while to need to be recycled, which is a strong point for them as products. However, when they do need to be replaced, don’t forget to send them to a responsible recycler.
Related posts:
- How Do I Recycle CDs and CD Cases? This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series...
- How Can You Recycle Wine Corks? This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series...
- Greener Under Twenty: Use Rechargeable Batteries This entry is part 10 of 11 in the series...
