ReThink Success

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. You have probably heard of (and seen) this famous 3-R triangle. The first two are fairly straightforward because YOU can have direct control over what you buy and how it is used after its normal life-cycle. However, recycling occurs outside your realm of control and it is a different process depending on where you live. Recycling is a pretty simple concept: take something that isn’t useful anymore and make it into something new instead of just throwing it away. It can be anything from recycling old paper into new paper, to converting glass bottles to tile or countertops. But in reality, recycling can get pretty complex–how it interacts with our environment, our politics, our economy and even our own human behavior patterns will play a major role in the future of our planet. Regardless of how little control we have over the process or its complexity there are simple steps that can be taken to recycle the products that we buy or obtain depending on the recycling program in your community.

Benefits of Recycling

As our population continues to grow and our natural resources continue to be mined and depleted, it is a no-brainer that it is better to recycle an item than to throw it away. It’s good for the environment, rewarding, and, in some areas, can earn you spare change. Recycling helps cut waste that would otherwise be buried in landfills and provides a steady supply of pre-used materials that can be transformed into new, practical objects we use every day. For example, the aluminum can that is currently holding that soda in your fridge or on your desk may have held somebody else’s beverage just 60 days ago before it was recycled. Recycling is beneficial to the environment and to us.

For example, recycling efforts in 2000 resulted in an annual energy savings of at least 660 trillion BTUs, which equals the amount of energy used in 6 million households annually, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Need more reasons to recycle? Check these out:

• If everyone who subscribes to the New York Times recycled, we’d keep over 6,000 tons of pollution out of the air.
• The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million.
• Recycling aluminum cans saves 95 percent of the energy required to make the same amount of aluminum from its virgin source, bauxite.
• Recycling glass instead of making it from silica sand reduces mining waste by 70%, water use by 50%, air pollution by 20%.
• If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles used, it would keep 200 million pounds of plastic out of landfills.

How Recycling Works

Thankfully, in my community, we have available a recycling facility that utilizes a single-stream recycling process (check out this video for an example). For this type of process, recyclables are collected in one container at the source (your home or office) and then sorted at a central facility. The process is similar to regular trash collection in many communities. You just dump all of your recyclables (no separating required) in a separate bin and it is collected on the same day that the trash is collected on a weekly basis. My community provided every household with a small blue bin with a cover, similar to, but smaller than, the green trash bin for regular trash. However, for many other communities, homeowners must either separate their recyclables into separate piles–paper, plastics, glass, etc–to either have them picked-up or must make a special trip to dispose of the materials at a collection center.

The reason why many communities don’t offer single-stream recycling is because it usually isn’t profitable and is usually has to be subsidized. But while the financial costs of recycling may not always benefit the recycler (i.e., it can sometimes cost more to recycle than what can be recouped in selling the final materials) the environmental costs are clearly beneficial.

How to Make Recycling Work For You

Even though my community offers single-stream recycling, I still found that my household was not recycling everything. We keep our recycling bin outside with our trash bin; and like many households we have trash cans located in the kitchen, bathrooms, bedrooms, and home office. However, we only had one recyclables container located in the kitchen. This is where we threw out all of our food empties–spaghetti sauce jars, aluminum cans, beer bottles, etc. In our office and bathroom, we didn’t have a recyclables container so all of our paper from the office (e.g., mailings, newspaper, print-outs, etc) and empty shampoo bottles and other empty plastic containers from the bathroom mindlessly got thrown in the trash. To remedy this situation, we bought separate containers for the office and bathroom for these items. Now we recycle most of the disposable items in our home. I’ve seen some companies, like Simple Human, that now make a combined trash/recycling container. If you want to go high-tech and high-design (and high-brow), check out the Ecopod designed by BMW. For those who don’t live in a community that offer single-stream recycling, consider purchasing a stackable bin unit that allows you to separate your recyclables and then easily remove the bins to either deposit curbside or at your local recycling drop-off center. Once you’ve set-up a system that works for you, then the act of recycling will become second nature. Now if we can just get manufacturers to stop producing and selling us products that are so wasteful to begin with (or we stop buying them until they do). But that’s a blog entry for another day. Happy recycling!

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