I’ve always wanted to be a true recycler. I’ve never taken the time to organize a place to do it, so I’m making it a goal. I’ve started with aluminum cans.

Or so Kermit would have us believe, lol. Actually, I’m thinking this one is gonna be pretty easy after all. I drive by the new(ish) recycling center in my town pretty much on a daily basis, so I thnk I’m just gonna pick up a couple of different colored garbage cans and label them paper, plastic, etc., and then just drop them off once a week or so on my way to work. Really, the biggest obstacle is going to be going and getting the cans, which I really don’t think will be difficult at all. Now if I can just avoid Miss Piggy while doing it…..

I was walking home and I noticed that someone’s garbage can was just full of recyclable aluminum cans! So, I took the cans and crushed them! There was 125 cans all together! I can even take those in and get paid for them! :)

The first time I heard about Global Warming and how to stop it I’ve been working as hard as I can to recycle and clean polluted areas.

...nobody!!? hello!!?

As mentioned in my previous post, i am in a country where the concept of recycle-bins and drop-off points is non-existent for a majority of the population. So i am learning to recycle in the limited resources available to me here. This is what i have learned so far. Need further help from you guys:

I have segregated all the stuff into the following groups:

• Paper: Includes newspapers, wrappers, cardboards, pizza boxes, shopping mall bills…pretty much anything paper in which food items have not been wrapped, or rather that have not been touched by food.

• Plastic: Bags, Wraps, Containers…again, pretty much anything plastic.

• Glass: Self-explanatory

• Metal: Self-explanatory

• Electronics: Self-explanatory (includes electric wires)

• Earthenware: Pots, mugs, chinaware, etc.

• Clothes: Self-explanatory

(a) and (b) are the major ones i am focusing on right now. How things work around here for these is that you don’t have a drop-off point. Instead, you have to take these to what can roughly be translated as “old-paper shop”. They have fixed rate at which they will buy this junk from you. They will pretty much segregate this stuff for you. Bu the catch is that they will reject stuff that they themselves cannot sell to recycling plants or ‘other’ sources.

Some Questions:

• My major question is that a LOT of stuff comes wrapped in plastic. I have somewhat reduced the plastic by using cloth shopping bags. But, if you order take-away or home-delivery then you do not have control in how they package. A lot of food items comes packaged in small plastic bags, rather than containers. My question is, can i wash these bags and put them up for recycling? Washing them would require soap/cleaners to get the oil, etc. off, so i am not sure.

• One of the items i am concerned with is pressurized containers, like the ones used in Deodorants, Insect sprays, Room fresheners, etc. Now, the old-paper shop will buy them, but there is a danger that they can be sold to sources that can use them to make counterfeit products. Other kinds of paper & plastic you can tear up or crush or puncture, but you can’t do that with pressurized containers…help, please!

Because i live in a country where a concept of recycle bins and drop-off points doesn’t exist!

I am gonna have to innovate…a lot!

Hopefully this place will answer some of the questions and help me get grip on things. This and google…lol!

I saw a friend of mine digging through the trash and asked him about it – he told me he was picking out the recyclables. I asked him about where to take the stuff and what to take and he showed me about the 1’s and 2’s on the bottom of plastics. At first I was just saving some things (because of the storage factor) but I felt guilty every time I threw something away. Now I am trying to save everything. When I finally got enough to take down to the center they were closed! The stuff is still in my car, but I’m gonna take it!

We now have a green bin for recyclable rubbish so its a start. I still want to:

get a water butt for rain water and use it for plants or use it for flushing toilet

have a compost heap for food rubbish

stop using so many plastic bags!!

Well, I bought recycling bins about a month ago, and we’ve been separating everything, but it’s been quite a challenge to find out when the pickup is, because in our city most people have not even heard of recycling, have no idea what it is or why they’d want to do it, and they certainly can’t tell us when we should take our bags downstairs. If we take them down on the wrong day, the cleaning men at our apartments will just toss the stuff in the dumpster, which kind of defeats the point.