Recycling — It’s Not Just About What You Put in Your Blue Bin

As consumers, we recycle what ever the state allows and what ever the state demands. That usually includes newspapers, magazines, catalogs and colored direct mail pieces, brown kraft cardboard, bottles, cans and plastic. In my state, we only recycle plastic that has a number 1 or 2 on it. (Sadly, the little numbers in the recycling triangle on the back of plastic containers go up to 6, so we are still throwing away quite a bit of material.)

But recycling is about much more than just what we put in our blue bins. For instance, do you recycle your printer ink cartridges? Staples has always had a bin in their stores where people can drop their used ink cartridges for recycling. For several months now, they’ve also been running a promotion that gives a $3.00 coupon for every ink cartridge handed in at the checkout counter.

Stop & Shop grocery stores have a carton in the entranceway that accepts used plastic bags. There are companies that recycle cell phones, and if you do a web search, you should be able to find one you can mail your phone to. For decades, we’ve been recycling glasses — not in the sense that they melt them down, but they are given to less fortunate people who need them. In fact, there are recycling bins for glasses in every Pearle Vision Center in my market. I even take my old hangers to the dry cleaners for recycling, and of course, any books, clothes or other materials that might be useful to others to the Goodwill.

The point is, recycling is not something we should take lightly. The planet earth is our home. When it takes one bag of garbage 50 years to decompose, and we produce millions of bags of garbage every year around the world, how much longer do you think we can go on before we run out of landfill space? In some areas of the U.S., children’s parks and even entire living communities are built on top of landfills, leaving the residents there to silently inhale the gases that composting garbage emits.

Please think about this every time you throw something away. Ask yourself, is this item recyclable? The survival of nature and your very own neighborhood depends on it.

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