Last spring i decided that just because it might not be "convenient" for us to recycle we still needed to figure out a way to recycle as many things as possible.
When we got our new kitchen cabinets all of them came in cardboard boxes, and it pained me to think that all those boxes (and there were A LOT of them) would just go into the trash. I thought if Kaylee were old enough we could make a play house or color on them or something. I had recently watched an Oprah about recycling and thought i would try to find a recycling center near us that we could take the boxes. She mentioned a wesite on her show, so I went to the awesome webite http://www.earth911.org/. On that site i was able to search for the various types of recycling centers in our area. I quickly found that there were not any close to us. But decided that i was still worth it, despite the "inconvenience." I loaded up all of the boxes into the bed of the truck and off we went. It felt so good to think that all those boxes were not just wasted.
In the meantime we started saving our glass bottles, cans, and plastic containers. We would take them to either of our parents house to put in their recycle bins, because they live in a town were all they have to do is put the recycling out on trash day and they come and pick it up, how nice is that? After a few months we realized that we were overflowing their bins. And thought that it would be best if we just saved them until there were enough to make the trip to the recycling center. We keep everything that we want to recycle in one place in the garage and then when it gets to be too much, we make the trip. So now we recycle cardboard, paper, glass, plastic, cans, and we just learned that our recycling center takes tin cans too so we are going to start that too. I think that it will be a wonderful lesson for Kaylee once she is able to understand the benefits of recycling.
Did you know:
Recycling 1 aluminum can saves enough electricity to run a TV for 3 hours!
We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum soda cans every year!
To produce each week's Sunday newspapers, 500,000 trees must be cut down!
Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour! Most of them are thrown away!
Plastic bags and other plastic garbage thrown into the ocean kill as many as 1,000,000 sea creatures every year!
The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100-watt light bulb for four hours. It also causes 20% less air pollution and 50% less water pollution than when a new bottle is made from raw materials.
A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill.
About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material.
The US population discards each year 16,000,000,000 diapers, 1,600,000,000 pens, 2,000,000,000 razor blades, 220,000,000 car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the US commercial air fleet four times over.
More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of aluminum foil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it.
Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!
A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
For more recycling facts visit http://www.recycling-revolution.com/recycling-facts.html
My point is, no matter how much you are able to recycle, EVERY little bit helps. Also, you can begin thinking about the products you buy and how much packaging comes with them. Start looking for products with less packaging or packaging that can be recycled. Think of ways to reuse products before recycling them, sorta like recycling in your own house.
Besides the good feeling you get from knowing that you are doing something to help our earth, we also noticed a DRAMATIC decrease in our trash each week. We were filling up all three of our garbage cans and then some. Now if we forget to take the trash out one week we still only use one can.
So my challenge to all of you is find a way to start recycling! It is the easiest thing you can do to BE GREEN, it doesn't cost you ANYTHING!
2 comments:
nice post :)
I have been recycling for the past twenty-five years. And have made over nine hundred dollars in recycling aluminum cans. Here in SA we have recycle bins in all the schools and you can drop most of your recycle (paper,some cardboard etc.) and on Mondays the city picks the other recylcle like tin cans,all glass products,plastic products etc. connie
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