Green Plus » recycling

How to Recycle #5 Plastics

Institute for Sustainable Development — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 14:19:33 +0000

If you use local recycling services, there’s a decent chance #5 platics aren’t accepted. Yogurt, cottage cheese, hummus, and medicine bottles are commonly packaged in #5 plastic containers. If you’re a serious recycler and your municipality doesn’t accept #5 plastic, there may be another option available – returning these items to select Whole Foods stores. Whole Foods sends them to a company called Preserve to be turned into items such as toothbrushes.

To learn about what materials are accepted for recycling in your area, check out the fabulous website, Earth911. At the Earth911 site, you can type in any material and your zip code and see if there is a site that will accept the product.

Learn more about Whole Foods Gimme 5 initiative and find out if there’s a store near you participating. If there’s not a store in your area participating, there’s also the option to mail it to Preserve.

Thanks to Karen Bender of Quality Staffing in Raleigh for this tip!

The Washington Post on Recyclable or Not? Answers to Tricky Recycling Questions

Green Plus — Thu, 25 Mar 2010 13:41:21 +0000

(From the Washington Post) Do I have to remove the staples when I recycle my magazines? What about envelopes and pasta boxes that have plastic windows in them?

Twenty-five years ago, you would have been advised to keep staples and plastic windows out of the recycling bin. But these days, paper mills are more than equipped to handle these common interlopers. (Plastic bags inside food boxes should still be taken out and placed in the regular trash bin.)

When bales of sorted paper arrive at a mill, they’re fed into a huge, blenderlike contraption along with water and chemicals. The resulting pulp goes through a number of purification steps. First, a long chain called a ragger is lowered into the swirling mixture; things such as twine and wire wrap around the chain and get pulled out. A metal screen at the bottom of the pulper picks out more contaminants — this should be when your plastic window fragments are removed. Next, the slurry is spun around in a cone-shaped hydrocyclone — which separates out higher-density items such stones and bits of metal (including staples) — and then it’s screened again through a finer mesh. Finally, if the pulp is being made into high-quality product such as white office paper, air bubbles and detergents are pumped in to wash away unwanted ink particles.

When I get something in the mail that’s wrapped with packing tape, can I recycle the paper and the box, or will the tape mess things up?

As long as it’s plastic-backed tape and there isn’t a ton of it on the package, you should be good to go. The tape will break up and be removed by the screens or hydrocyclone. However, anything paper-based that you peel and stick — such as labels, children’s stickers and masking tape — may fragment into pieces too tiny to be removed effectively. Those little sticky bits remain dispersed in the pulp slurry; if enough of them coalesce, they can jam up the papermaking equipment or form weak spots in the finished product. (Moisture-activated adhesives — such as those used on lick-to-seal envelopes — will dissolve in the water and are fine to throw into the bin.)

Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be much consensus on which types of peel-and-stick items are worth the trouble of removing. One expert said that address labels on envelopes and magazines are anathema but that Post-its are just fine. Another told the Lantern more or less the opposite: that anything you can pull off easily should be removed, but that anything that would otherwise need to be cut or torn off can be ignored. The best advice is to check the guidelines in your area (which should always be your first step anyway); if they don’t specify, then follow the Lantern’s rule of thumb: When in doubt, throw it out. (One item that’s generally okay to leave on: U.S. postage stamps, which are formulated with recycle-friendly adhesives.)

Can I recycle paper with Wite-Out on it?

Wite-Out isn’t considered a problem, mostly because it’s used in such trivial amounts. It will likely flake off in the pulper, and the resulting chips will get screened out. So go ahead and toss in those early drafts of your magnum opus.

How bad is it, really, to throw the occasional greasy pizza box in with your recycling?

Diligent recyclers know that food-contaminated paper is an item non grata in your curbside bin. There are a few reasons for this. For one thing, it means increased costs at the sorting facility. Baled paper can sit for weeks before it gets pulped — plenty of time for any food particles to spoil and rot, making life highly unpleasant for the millworkers. Finally, greases and oils can be tough to remove completely. Whether that’s a problem depends on what the mill is making: A bit of grease won’t be a big deal if the end product is brown grocery bags or tissue paper, but it could easily ruin a batch of white office paper.

Pizza boxes may not be the worst offenders in this regard, because they’re big enough to be identified and removed at the sorting facility. Plus, the cheesy residue is likely to stay contained within the box. Recyclers have more trouble with such things as salad dressing: oily foodstuffs that might drip onto other items in a bale.

What should I do with old books? Can they be recycled?

Yes, but not always through your curbside program. Many communities accept paperbacks and phone books, but you should check your specific curbside recycling rules to see whether they will take hardcovers, which contain problematic binding glues and coatings on the covers. Otherwise, if your library doesn’t want your books, search the database at Earth911.com for a book recycler in your area. Failing that, you can slice out the pages using scissors or an X-Acto blade and put them in with your regular paper recycling.

Electronic Waste – No Easy Solution

Elizabeth Liedel — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 13:26:09 +0000

Photo courtesy of Greenpeace

Let’s face it – it’s difficult to run a business these days without investing in a significant amount of electronic equipment. Computers, printers, photocopying and fax machines, cell phones and PDAs… they are all crucial pieces in maintaining communication with clients and suppliers, not to mention staying on top of the latest business trends. But as technology improves at an increasingly rapid rate, what do you do with that outdated laptop or cell phone?

Throwing away used electronics poses a number of significant environmental harms. First, there are the nasty substances – like lead, mercury, brominated flame retardants, and in some cases cadmium – that leach from landfills to contaminate groundwater and soil. Second, trashing your ewaste takes plastics and precious metals – such as copper, gold, silver, and palladium – out of circulation. Not only does the waste never resurface as uable material, it also forces the further mining of these substances for the production of new electronics. Incineration is just as bad – it releases all those heavy metals into the air, where they wreak havoc on our lungs and bioaccumulate in our food chain. So, you say to yourself, that vintage computer that still runs Windows 95 – I’ll recycle it. Right?

Not so fast. Ewaste reycling programs are riddled with problems of their own – primarily, the issue that most ewaste is sent overseas to be recycled in countries with weak environmental protections – China, for example, where whole towns face health hazards like air pollution, water contamination, lead poisoning, cancer-causing dioxins, and higher rates of miscarriage. And since the United States has refused to sign onto the Basel Convention, an international treaty designed to reduce the transfer of hazardous waste between nations, the transfer of American ewaste – or the “effluent of the affluent” – to these countries is entirely legal.

So what’s an environmentally and socially responsible business to do? Glad you asked.

First, commit to not junking your ewaste – it’s illegal in many states to send this waste to the landfill, anyway.
Second, consider donating your old electronics. Many non-profits are happy to use slightly outdated equipment, and there are plenty of resources out there to help you wipe your computer’s memory and make sure that your proprietory information is kept under wraps. And many women’s shelters welcome the donation of your old cell phones, which can become emergency lines of communication for women in need.
Third, check into your local ewaste recycling options. The New York Times reported yesterday that the state of Maine, for example, requires that computer and television manufacturers recycle their products for free. The National Center for Electronics Recycling is working to develop national – and safe – electronics recycling infrastructure within the U.S. And the Shelter Alliance can resell or recycle cell phones – with strict environmental commitments – and even offers a revenue-generating option for non-profits who are willing to collect cell phones within their communities. Wherever you recycle your ewaste, make sure to obtain information on their environmental policies and whether or not they ship waste overseas.
Lastly, support national policies that encourage manufacturers to encorporate design for the environment. Mandatory recycling services, for example, are likely to encourage manufacturers to design their products in a way that faciliatates easy and safe recycling. But piecemeal state policies are hurting manufacturers, who struggle to meet different standards in different states. Federal law could change all that.

More at the U.S. EPA.

New Ways to Make Money by Recycling

Dale Hammer — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 13:35:59 +0000

While recycling benefits the environment by conserving the earth’s resources, it can also be profitable for small, medium, and large businesses. Cleveland Metroparks Zoo, for example, made $12,860 in 2008 alone by recycling over 140 tons of recyclable materials. In addition to recycling its own materials, the Cleveland Zoo has encouraged visitors to recycle certain materials when they visit the zoo like inkjet and toner cartridges, cell phones, and compact fluorescent lights. While such profitable gains only seem possible for large businesses, small businesses can also get credit for recycling by utilizing new companies like Recycle Bank. Recycle Bank collects curbside recycling bins at homes and small businesses. Each bin has a Radio Frequency Identification chip, which records the weight of the recycled materials and converts the weight of recyclable materials to points in your account. These points can be used at over 1,200 national and local Recycle Bank Rewards Partners just like cash. Recycle Bank offers homeowners and smaller businesses an incentivized program that both helps the environment and generates profits.

To read more about how Cleveland Metroparks Zoo has generated so much money through recycling, read the rest of the article here.

To read more about Recycle Bank and how the program works, see the Recycle Bank website here.

To read more about the rapid growth of Recycle Bank and plans for future growth, click here.