Actually Recycling My Recylables
By Jenn | July 29, 2010
Sometimes recycling is easy: NYC provides pick-up for paper, metal, and glass recycling, along with a limited variety of coded plastic. All I need to do is bring my sorted bags out to the curb the evening before pickup, and away goes my recycling for the week. It’s like magic!
Less magical are all the other recyclable items I’m collecting in my home which the city doesn’t collect, but private firms do. This includes CFLs, batteries, printer cartridges, CDs, wine corks, and dead electronics. And since most of these things need to go to different places, it’s kind of a huge pain to get them out of my house and on to the next stages of their lives.
However, when the “Others” recyclables box in my hall closet begins to overflow with this collected junk, I know it’s time to hunker down and sort it out and figure out what goes where and how to get it there. Best Buy accepts many items through their applaudably extensive recyling program, as do Home Depot, Whole Foods, and Ikea. For me, since I travel by public transport or under my own foot/pedal power, my journeys to these places need to be planned & timed well, to combine trips and reduce the amount of crap I’m carrying around.
When it comes down to it, I’m just really thankful there are mainstream and relatively easy-to-access recycling points for all of this stuff now. So many people are making the switch to CFL bulbs, which is great! But those bulbs do eventually burn out, and due to the mercury contained inside, are too toxic to send to a landfill. But since there’s a Home Depot withing spitting distance of most communities these days, it gives folks a way to be responsible for their purchase from beginning to end.
One day soon I’ll rally the enthusiasm to deal with these items. Until then, I’ll just keep adding more recyclables to the box in my closet, and hope that no one opens the door.
How do you handle your recyclable items which are not collected by your municipality?
[Image by Finding Josephine via Creative Commons]
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Topics: Waste |
My municipality collects NOTHING. I used to have to haul everything to various locations.
However, the apartment complex where I live has recently installed (rented from waste mgmt co.) a bin where you can recycle all kinds of paper, metal, and plastics, just not glass. So now I just have to take the glass out to the one place in town that collects it… it’s behind Walmart and a pain in the butt, but it takes me a while to accumulate much. I have a collection bag for batteries, it’s not full yet as I don’t use many batteries. Haven’t had any CFL bulbs burn out yet but I would take them to Home Depot. There are community sponsored electronics collection events from time to time, so when I have something I take it to one of those. Overall though, I don’t mind doing all that stuff once in a while. I’m VERY glad I don’t have to haul the majority of the paper & stuff around anymore.
Mine also sit around taking up space until I get around to it…
We are lucky in that the local dump has a place to sort out items, though I need to find a place to take batteries as they just put them in the trash.
On the other hand, my city cancelled their HAZMAT drop off this year so I am currently getting ready to move old cans of paint, stain and a metal container full of “Volatile Rags” (from a staining project) to my new home. I’ve tried to move to less toxic and dangerous materials, but still had items hanging around from years ago.
The stuff my city doesn’t pick up…well, the local college has an e-cycle event once a month. And there’s a battery drop-off place in city hall. (Cool, right?) I don’t have anything that doesn’t fit those categories yet.
The city where I live ( which I believe means the same as my municipality :> ) takes a lot of stuff. The rest I stock until I have a pickup load. I take it to my brother’s place who lives in the largest city in Oregon. They take almost all of it.
P.S. I have now baked my own pop tarts from your recipe and we made our own hummus. Awesome!
oh great! I hope the poptarts were delicious.