The recycling poll

Thanks for this Jack. Let's see who is willing to say how they put their "beliefs" where their mouth is.

I pay $1 a month for a bin that goes out with my trash. In it I can place

Aluminum cans
tin (soup) cans
clear and dark glass
Newsprint
any paper (mail, etc)
Plastic labeled #1 or #2
Milk/drink cartons
Styrofoam
edited to add cardboard

And I usually fill it and then some every week. I recycle EVERYTHING I am allowed to.

 

Indicated - other

You can pay a private hauler by me, or take it yourself to the transfer station where you pay either by the bag ($2 for a 32 gal, $4 for the 'contractor bags' or a tipping fee by scale weight - $10 minimum). I take it myself because we don't produce nearly enough to make up the price to have someone pick it up for me.

I am a recycling nut.... I even know by heart which plastic symbols my county will take... 1,2,3,5,7
Plastic
Metal cans (aluminum & tin)
Glass,
Corrugated cardboard
newspapers
magazines
batteries
misc metal

Oh, plus the 5 cent deposit soda cans & bottles.. either to the store for money or some org (Little league, Animal Shelter, etc)has a bin at the transfer station where you can donate them



Maybe paying by the bag encourages recycling, but I know that's not practical in most situations. One of the local villages had it where you had to buy special bags from the village or else they wouldn't pick it up. Encouraged alot of illegal dumping, or garbage placed in front of someone's house on the street


BTW, one of mt favorite Dilbert Cartoons is where Dilbert says to the janitor " I have two bins at my desk, one for recycling, the other for trash. I notice you have only one barrel you walk around with to empty them. Do you make two trips?

The janitor replies ", Uh, just turn around for a minute"

 

We recycle what they will accept:
plastics 1 & 2 only
aluminum, tin, and steel cans
corrogated cardboard
newspaper and magazines
office paper
all glass

Even this small amount reduces our garbage from 3-4 garbage bags to 1-2 a week.

 

I selected 4 but also recycle my oil filters and antifreeze and all plastics involved in bagging groceries. Our J doesn't accept triangle 3 plastic, what's so special about 3?

 

We recycle everything that our local recycling company will take. Our juridiction has NO provisions for recycling. Private business recyclers only and you have to bring it to them. Most of the recycling we do is gratis.


And right now I am over a month overdue to make a run. No one wants to see our basement right now.

 

I'd like to see more radical approach to recycling, even though it's great to have all people to volunteer and being conscientious about the effort. Ultimately it's just a drop in the bucket.

Perhaps it's a time, not only for the consumer to recycle but also the producer of goods, Obviously the array of products can be open to debate as they all have different impact on environment.

Let's say the most hazardous goods: car makers, electronics etc. I think Nokia (random choice) should be recycling my old cell phone, scrub all metals and plastic compounds. Not only it benefits the environment but also protects from openning more mines that are so destructible.

The rape and pillage of coltan in DRC is an example how mankind is disrespectful to it's resources.
Why can't we force Motorola, Sony etc to recycle?

http://www.cellular-news.com/coltan/


Cost prohibitive, obviously but resources will only deplete eventually and recycling will become inevitable.

 

My town doesn't provide curbside pickup of trash or recycling (we pay for that ourselves). But they do have a centralized recycling center which takes 1's and 2's, newspaper, cardboard, aluminum, tin, glass, junk mail, bulky non-household trash, metals, oil, tires, and refrigerators.

Consequently, I only need to put the one trash can out at the curb every 2 weeks or so.

 

I moved from a NY city suburb in NJ, which required recycling, to a small town in MD where recycling services are not available.

Used to put one tiny bag of trash out on the curb each week. Now I'm throwing out a bag of trash each day. Putting glass bottles or metal cans in the trash drives me nuts so I rinse and stockpile and beg my poor husband to haul them to work since they recycle. Office paper and envelopes get reused as scratch paper. We live on the Chesapeake Bay so the town at least offers recycling for used motor oil.

That crazy feeling was the same I experienced while vacationing in Italy.
It was during the last, bad drought on the east coast. Parks were closed to hikers because of the fire risk, the trees were drooping, desperate, leaves shriveled and discolored. Water use was restricted.
Visited Rome. They have ancient free-running water spigots throughout the old part of the city. Water splashes and flows into marble basins, continously. People paused to scoop water into their mouths and then continued with their day. Whenever I heard water gurgling, I'd say to my companions, how can they do that? How do they tolerate that? I felt the urge to stop and turn the fountains off whenever we passed one.

 

we recycle any and all things that are accepted by the company that picks up the trash/recycling stuff. although they do much less recycling here than in other areas we've lived.

 

We pre- and re-cycle everything possible. We use heavy duty cloth bags for grocery shopping (I hate those hard-to-recycle plastic bags). We have a large garden and incorporate Starbuck's used coffee grounds. We rototill in several trailer loads of horse manure and autumn leaves each spring. We avoid anything that is "single use." We do not use "drive-throughs", single-use cameras. Our yard is composed of drought-tolerant native plants that require no watering, are genetically prostrate and require pruning only once per year.

On the other hand, work specializes in single-use items (styrofoam cups, plates, pizza in cardboard) computer paper - all which is not recycled. The culture of "use once then discard" is hard to overcome.

 

I have this one big green bin, provided to me by the town, in which you can toss stuff like cans, and cardboard into.

It gets collected once a week along with all the other garbage.

I do it, but grudgingly. In an ideal world, maybe we could create some jobs at the dump by having people sort it out there.

 

Our recycling is dismal. They pick up paper and aluminum cans only. I don't even think there's a recycling bin in the township for plastic or other metal.

Pickup is biweekly, but if there's a holiday (like this month) it is common for there to be only one recycle pickup in the month. My garage gets pretty full sometimes!

 

We recycle PETE and HDPE (1,2) as well as glass, aluminium, newspaper, and steel cans through the J. I think it costs us $4.50/mo for two pickups. We also recycle office paper, cardboard, paperboard, and magazines but we have to take them to the recycling center ourselves.

I wish that I could find somewhere that would recycle the higher number plastics as well as grocery bags. In tucson it was really easy to recycle the plastic bags. Every grocery took them back. Here in Denver I havn't found one yet. Ought get some of those canvas shopping bags. I hate all of that plastic. It's HDPE but the J won't accept them because they're not bottles (the only plastic that the J will accept). <_<

It's amazing how much less garbage we generate. Even with a kid in diapers we only have 1.5 bags on the curb each week. We can easily go 2 weeks if we miss a pickup.

As the cost of oil goes up I wonder if we'll see a smaller variety of plastics. I bet all of that superfluous packaging will disappear as well.

 

My jurisdiction provides pickup for almost everything, and I take full advantage of it. It's pretty rare that we put out all 4 containers at once: garbage, paper, newspaper, and plastic & cans. I usually leave the plastic bags at the store, and I've noticed the clerks are more comfortable with this than they used to be. Garbage is usually put out every two weeks unless there's something really nasty smelly in it. We get one weekly newspaper, some of which ends up in the compost and doesn't make it into the bag. Scrap office paper is given to the kids for crafts and model airplanes (I'm often counted as one of the kids), and the confidential stuff gets shredded and composted or used for packing . All the fruit and vegetable waste is composted, along with the garden waste. (One of the four composts is our old laundry tubs, which my wife is not keen on having in the yard, but I think is kinda funky.) I've also signed a donor card to recycle ME when the time comes, but I'm in no hurry.

 

The City of Sacramento does a great job a recycling. We have one wheeled 96 gallon container for all recycle material. It is picked-up at curbside ever other week, and costs $2.55 per month. (it normally takes us 1.5 to 2 months to fill it, so I make less trips to the curb . . . kind of like the Prius and gas stations. )

Glass: All bottles and jars are recycled. No need to remove labels and lids.
Paper: All products - Newspaper/Mixed Paper/Cardboard (except food-contaminated). They even say to just throw in junk mail as is.
Plastics: All plastics are recycled.
Cans: All empty aluminum, steel, and tin cans.
Used motor oil and E-waste can also be left at the curb with prior notification to the city.

Neighborhood Cleanup: About once a year or so, the city has a program in which the city will pick-up all appliances, furniture, televisions, computers, monitors, mattresses, carpets, toys, pipe, wood, fencing material, lumber. Just place it at your curb no earlier than 24 hours prior to the scheduled date. (50 percent of this material ends up being recycled)

Hazardous Household Waste: Several days a week, the city and county accept hazardous waste, free of charge, at two designated locations.

Green (garden) waste: It is left at the curb in piles for weekly pick-up. People new to Sacramento don't like the look (I think it's a charming, small town look), but with the vast number of trees in Sacramento, trying to containerize it would be utter madness! The green waste is mulched and used in parks, farms, etc. and is available for homeowners and gardeners. Sacramento rivals Paris for number of trees, but ours are much healthier.

 

I may have been confused, but voted #8.

Our town doesn't provide containers but has several dropoff locations for:

Plastics: #1, #2, #5

Newspaper

Office Paper

All Glass

Cardboad

Scrap Metal & Large furniture items (we don't ever use).

It does seem to help in our garbage, cutting it down to 1 bag a week instead of 2. We make a trip to We can't recycle #3 either, there must be something with #3.

I also coordinate a reycling program for the Psych department with white paper and newspaper. For just two floors, about once every 3 weeks I take a couple of 50 gallon drums of office paper and one drum of newspaper to the recycling center in the Prius.

We also reuse our plastic grocery bags as trash bags for our small trashcans and take the rest to Wal-Mart to recycle.

 

I think today's garbage dumps will be tomorrow's resource mines.