Recycling

Our city, like many municipalities, offers a free recycling program.  Why?  Simply put, recycling makes sense economically.  The city makes money off its recycling program because it can sell the material to companies that will reuse and repurpose the material.

Additionally, by offering a recycling program, the city reduces the volume of trash that is dumped in the landfill.  The city has to pay per cubic yard for material that ends up in the landfill.  Let’s sum up the economics here.  Recycling good, trash bad.

To that end, we do our part by putting out the least amount of trash a week as we can.  When the city offered us three different garbage cart sizes, we chose the smallest one, a 33 gallon cart.  Our recycling cart is the same size as the largest garbage bin, 96 gallons.

Using cloth diapers has really helped us cut down on the amount of trash we contribute to the landfill.  One estimate puts disposable diapers at 50% of a households generated waste.  This display kind of puts that number in light.

What’s more is that it takes around 500 years for disposable diapers to decompose.  If you were put in disposables as a baby, then your diapers are still festering somewhere and still looking very much like diapers.  Umm, ewww.

Enough of my tangent.  What can be recycled to reduce waste?  Our municipality takes:

• newspapers,
• magazines and catalogs
• junk mail and paper
• cereal and food boxes
• cardboard
• books (remove hard covers)
• plastics #1-5 & #7
  • water and soda bottles
  • milk and juice jugs
  • detergent bottles
  • plastic tubs and jars
• glass bottles (green, clear, & brown)
• glass jars (separate lids first)
• aluminum cans
• tin and steel cans

They do not accept:

• ceramics
• mirrors
• window glass
• scrap metal
• food scraps
• light bulbs
• hazardous waste
• motor oil bottles
• hypodermic needles
• medical waste
• plastic bags
• styrofoam
• yard waste
• garbage
• electronics

Our municipality charges garbage by the size of the cart.  By getting the smallest cart and putting out less trash we save $48 a year.  The more important aspect for us is that we are doing less damage environmentally to the place we call home.