Posts Tagged ‘recycling’

Recycling is important for numerous environmental and non-environmental reasons. We are doing something right nowadays because recycling as a whole in the U.S is up in percentages the past few years (although we still have a long way to go). The unfortunate part is that the purchasing of recycled materials is down-way down.

I personally think that consumers are finally getting the education needed on “how-to” recycle and do realize the importance of doing so for the environment. The missing link though is also educating consumers on “why” it is so extremely vital to also purchase recycled materials. If we do not, then all of our efforts that went into recycling- from starting with us, to the money we spend for our cities recycling programs in tax dollars each year- goes right down the tubes. If we do not purchase recycled products, then there is no need to recycle and it will all wind up either in the landfills or our oceans anyway.

So what to do?? As I stated earlier you are doing something right by actually recycling so keep up the good work! If you are confused about recycling, or one of the biggest challenges is where to take certain items (3-7 plastics, hazardous waste such as batteries, lightbulbs, paint, etc) then a great source is earth911.org. You can either visit their website or look for the information on greenshops under green 101.

Now that you have started and it becomes part of your daily routine, you will really be surprised at how it changes your life. For one, you start to take notice of how much waste you actually consume each day and it starts to become a game. You will see your recycling bin start to increase each and every week and for your trash can to diminish. Since you are physically seeing the difference and conscious about what is being recycled and what is going into our landfills you instantly become aware of packaging. It drives me insane when I purchase a small item and it has all of that hard-to-open plastic everywhere! Why do they do that? They want you to love your item don’t they? I hate the thing before I even get it out of the package!

So now we have recycled, became aware of our packaging that we purchase and now for the final step. Look for the made from recycled materials symbol, wording or any other piece of information you can see that states it is made from recycled materials. Again, we cannot stress to you enough how important this is! Let’s take a stand and start to reduce the 300 million tons of trash that enters our landfills each and every year. If we use our purchasing power, then post consumer waste materials will become even more affordable and it will force manufacturers in the right direction!

People are always giving reasons of why they can’t recycle.  They don’t know where to go?  Earth911.com has made it so easy to find an option for almost anything you have in your home.  All you have to do is enter your area and what you want to recycle, and it will tells you where to go.  Now it can’t get any easier than that.  We all know that we need to recycle, and with this easy function you can always have an option.  Even better, they have created an application for your iPhone, once you install it you will have it available at your fingertips.  For those of you without a iPhone, there is an easy phone number to call 1-800-CleanUp.  Now with all this technology making it easy to find a recycling center, plus all the cities that offer curb side recycling, we should start having less than 15% of our trash end up in the landfills . . . right?

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