Recycling Made Easy
Published January 20th, 2008Depending on where you live, you may have various levels of organized recycling. For example, we have a “blue box” program where we use big blue bins to send back paper products, plastic, cans, and even styrofoam. Even if you don’t have organized pick-up from your home, there are still plenty of things that you can do at home to help the environment, and even your pocketbook. The theme of the article is the old “reduce, reuse, recycle”, all great ways to lighten your individual burden on mother earth.
Bags, bags, and more bags
- Buy a plastic bag organizer/holder that mounts onto the wall. You can have all of your grocery bags in one place for easy access to re-use. There are many different designs, but typically you squish new bags into the top, and can pull bags out of any of the holes in the sides.
- Pick up cloth or synthetic re-usable shopping bags. These are becoming very popular and come in many different styles. Many of them can be washed in the washing machine.
- Use biodegradable waste bags for your dog. You can likely order these through your local veterinarian or pet supply store. A couple of brands that I am aware of are Poopease, and BioBag Dog.
- Save and re-use nice gift bags, wine bags, or high-quality retail store bags for later use.
Labelled and organized boxes or bins in a central location
- Used batteries and printer cartridges, are recyclable, they usually just don’t pick it up right from your home. We have labelled shoe boxes on the shelf in the garage for batteries and ink cartridges, and put the item directly in there when we are done with them. Once a year, I collect up all of the odd recyclables in their containers and make one visit to get rid of them. Some retail stores also have recycling programs for batteries and ink cartridges. Of course, you can also just use rechargeable batteries and there are businesses that will refill your ink cartridge at a reduced cost.
- We have a closeable plastic tote that we keep other hazardous waste in, and then make a trip to dispose of it safely once a year.
- Large families will sometimes also have totes set up if members want to donate clothes they no longer want. When the tote gets full, just bag it and bring it into whichever charity you wish to support.
- The general idea here is that setting up containers ahead of time will make it much less effort to recycle any items that you are done with that can be re-used or re-purposed.
Composting
- If your municipality offers compost pick-up with your garbage, then take advantage of it.
- You can get a wide range of composters for your back yard that don’t require much maintenance.
- To make it easier, there are a lot of under-the-sink, and cupboard door mini-bins that you can use to avoid to many trips to the big composter every time you cook.
- What to compost? There is a lot of great info out there on what to compost, but generally any thing food like and natural or “organic”, with the exception of grease. Good examples are fruits, veggies and even eggshells.
Reduce your paper trail
- Place small recycle bins in your home office, study, or any place you go through a lot of virgin paper. When it’s garbage or recycling day, you can empty these bins in to the bigger recycling bin for curbside collection or to take to the recycling depot.
- Make an effort to use both sides of every sheet or paper. Take a red pen or marker and put a line through the side you already used to avoid confusion.
- If it’s in your budget, buy recycled office and household paper products. In Canada, President’s Choice has their Green line of toilet paper and paper towels, and in the U.S. Seventh Generation is one brand that I have used.
- You can have yourself taken off of any unnecessary mailing lists.
- Many utilities and other businesses who you pay bills to on a regular basis now offer e-statements instead or paper bills.
- You might be able to get your local newspaper, and most of your grocery flyers online now
- Some popular magazines now offer a completely digital subscription, this is not just a PDF, they even give you a cool program to view it in.
Make your eating habits more eco-friendly
- Consider investing in some different sizes of re-useable food storage containers. There are brands like Ziploc and Glad that make these containers a a very reasonable cost compared to the Tupperware brand. They are less durable than Tupperware, but you can still get a lot of mileage out of them.
- Buy lunch snacks in one bigger bulk package and divide them up into the food storage containers. This will dramatically cut down on the amount of single serving packages going to the landfill, and save you money for buying the larger-sized package.
- Consider using a re-useable lunch bag. You can now find many that are insulated with different compartments.
- Get a nice travel mug. When you go to your coffee shop, I’m sure they would be happy to refill your travel mug for you instead of wasting another paper cup.
- In a lot of cities, take-out restaurants will now let you bring your own containers to avoid bringing home any extra styrofoam. We keep an insulated foldable cooler handy for anything we want to keep hot or cold.
Hope this article has given you some ideas for how to help the environment in an easy way. I will be sure to write future articles about other ways that we can reduce our impact. Even though you might just be one person, living your life in a more responsible way will really add up over a year, and certainly over your lifetime. Passing these good habits on to any children in your life will help to ensure that they can have a healthy place to live in the future.
