10 Tips To Help Your Recycling Efforts

1. Set a convenient place aside to store and sort your recyclables.  Think about it, if you keep your recycling storage bin far away from your kitchen, are you as inclined to recycle?  Hell no, they are going to pile up until you are sick of seeing them.  Then you’re going to throw them away.  You know it…I know it.

2. Sort recyclables daily.  If you stay on top of it, it will only take a couple of minutes a day instead of an hour or two the night before trash day.  Most communities do not even require you to sort your recyclables anymore.  Just throw them in the bin and off you go!

3. You no longer have to rinse our cans and remove bottle labels.  Save yourself some time and throw them into their respective containers as is.

4. Use rechargeable batteries.  Seriously, you can go through hundreds of batteries, or 1 set of rechargeable’s.  I think the choice here is clear.

5. Plastic bag recycling. If you have tons of grocery store plastic bags, you can take them back to the grocery store.  They will take them off your hands and recycle them.  Or better yet, use re-usable bags.

6. One of the best ways to recycle is to cut down on the trash you take on in the first place.  Junk mail is one of those sources.  To opt out, go to opt-out.cdt.org.

7. Buy recycled products.  This is one of the best ways to remove tree and plastic byproducts from the waste stream.

8. Start a compost pile.  This is one of the greenest things you can do…period.   Think about it, you can utilize your organic waste and turn it into fertilizer!  This one is a no brainer.

9. When you get a new cellphone, recycle your old phone.   Just google “cellphone recycling”, you will find a wide variety of options.

10. Consider donating items you don’t want.  To make your items reusable in a lot of ways is better than recycling.  They have a place with someone who will actually put it to use.  Plus, you cut down on all the fossil fuels burned by conventional recycling.