Do you recycle? | Imamother

Mommy F.

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 11:48 am

How many people recycle, and what do you recycle?
Does your city pick up bottles and cans?
papers and cardboard?
compost?
diapers?

hello

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 11:53 am

By us everything has to get recycled (my mom has 3 cans in our den for this).
Somehow my landlord doesn't recycle so I dont either (gosh life is so much easier this way).

realeez

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 11:58 am

We have 3 types of garbage -
1 - food waste, diapers, that kind of thing
2 - recycling - papers, cardboard, cans, glass
3- anything else

Type 1 is picked up here once a week and types 2 and 3 on alternating weeks. We pay a yearly cost for the type 3 can. It's in our best interest to keep them as separate as possible so there is no overflow but I dont go crazy if the stuff gets mixed up a bit here and there.

louche

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 12:12 pm

Our municipality collects for recycling glass jars and bottles, all metal objects, cardboard and paper, and plastic bottles and jars.
Each type must be clean, so the pizza boxes with shreds of cheese and sauce or the foil pan with baked-on lasagna are possul. So are deli containers, styrofoam, plastic toys and utensils, mixed cardboard-and-whatever items, or other forms of glass like drinking glasses or mirrors.
Each type must be bagged separately, and if they see a bag of cardboard with a bottle in it, they'll throw out the whole "contaminated" bag.

I wish our recycling were like my in-laws'. The city GIVES you the bins, they take all recyclable materials, and you don't have to sort or clean them. I would clean the dirty food containers, anyway, b/c they hang around till collection day and putrefy if left dirty, but what a dream otherwise!

DefyGravity

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 12:17 pm

Mommy F. wrote:

How many people recycle, and what do you recycle?
Does your city pick up bottles and cans?
papers and cardboard?
compost?
diapers?

All of the above except diapers.

louche

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 12:17 pm

As to compost, there is no municipal composting but there are private not-for=profits that have places you can bring compostable materials. Once or twice a year they give away the mature compost to whoever wants it. I would cheerfully contribute my compostables, but as there is nothing very close to us, I can't see hoarding my potato peels for several months and traveling for an hour or so to bring them to the compost collection center. Would that I could.

I guess you could call me pale green. Seafoam, maybe.

grin

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 12:54 pm

I used to be gung-ho about recycling until I read an article in Reader's Digest about how much fuel and energy are wasted in the recycling process, both by transporting the used products to the recycling plant as well as in the plant itself. The conclusion of the article was that it often is more wasteful to recycle than to make new materials. Since then, I decided that Recycling (with a capital "R") isn't worth it, but I recycling plastic bags and such by bringing some with me to the store sometimes and other times refusing the store's bag entirely, preferring to consolidate purchases etc.

I also recycle food storage containers by washing emptys and reusing them instead of discarding used containers and buying brand new ones.

amother

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 1:55 pm

I think recycling is over-rated. I try to re-use things and not to make vast amounts of garbage. I try to recycle when/what I can, but sometimes I think recycling just more of a hassle than it's worth.

DH, on the other hand, is really into the recycling. He wants to recycle everything. I throw away food containers (ones that can't be re-used) if rinsing them in some water doesn't remove the food. DH puts the food containers into the dishwasher so that everything can be recycled. I keep asking him how, exactly, it's more efficient to run the dishwasher five times a day than to just throw food containers into the garbage.

Where we live they collect compost once a week. I cannot stand the compost. It's really gross. DH keeps a compost bin in the kitchen. I can't even open the top; it actually (sorry, TMI) makes me vomit. ewwww.

lech lecha08

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 2:28 pm

realeez wrote:

Are you in Toronto? We used to complain about the green bin program but now that we made aliyah and there's very little recycling, we're going through a lot more garbage bags.

chanahlady

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 2:36 pm

DH says there's a reason that recycling comes at the end of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I guess it's the third-best in that trifecta. So when we can't reduce or reuse, we recycle everything. We don't have numbers 3-7 plastic recycling here, so we bag all that up and take it to my IL's house once a month when we visit, where they do have such recycling.

Raisin

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 3:24 pm

I have 3 bins: black, brown, and green. brown is compost - food items, paper towels. green is paper, plastic and cans. black is evertything else. they are each picked up every other week. Rolling Eyes

my green bin is full way after a week. bh I managed to get a second black bin, but we are charged by the weight. I should really see if they will give me another green bin.

I do have a recycling center close by where I can take extra cardboard, old clothes, and glass.

realeez

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 3:44 pm

lech lecha08 wrote:

realeez wrote:

Are you in Toronto? We used to complain about the green bin program but now that we made aliyah and there's very little recycling, we're going through a lot more garbage bags.

Yup - how'd you guess? It's really not that bad now that I have gotten the hang of it!

Mrs Bissli

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 4:08 pm

We've got separate recycling bins for
* paper, newspaper, magazines, cardboard boxes, juice box
* plastic bottles
* tins (steel,aluminium) and jars
* bottles (clear coloured, coloured)
There are also separate communal bins where you can take textiles/clothes/shoes (the ones that don't get sent to charity shops), batteries, lightbulbs. No compost bins in my council (and we don't have a garden).

In some countries we've visited, you have to BUY specific rubbish bags--a great way to give economic incentives to reduce wastage.

amother

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 6:26 pm

I hide the stuff I'm supposed to recycle in the regular trash. Sorry, but I'm not washing out the disposable tin pans. I switched to black garbage bags so the collectors and ticket people wont see.

Reality

Thu, Nov 19 2009, 8:58 pm

I don't know if other fellow NYer's remember this but I will share anyway. A while back Mayor Bloomberg was looking for ways to cut $$ from the budget. He cut out recycling. Why? Because the city was PAYING to have it removed to I don't know where. It was NOT being re-used shock

. If I remember correctly paper was still being collected b/c it was actually being reused. But there was such an uproar from the PC people that he backed down & went back to "recycling". Rolling Eyes

Therefore, I stopped recycling. I live in a building so I can get away with it.

amother

Fri, Nov 20 2009, 10:14 am

You sound like me, amother! I'm the amother above whose DH washes the tin pans. DH fills the recycling bins long before our recycling day. For a while he had extra bags of recycling stacked in our garage (when the recycling bins get full, he puts extra recycling into bags in the garage). I finally convinced DH to take all of those bags to a recycling center. Now I try to take out the recycling when DH isn't looking. If the recycling bins are already full, I dump the recycling into a black trash bag and add it to the trash bin. I don't feel guilty because our trash bin never gets full anyway. The bags of excess recycling in the garage just doesn't work for me.

amother wrote:

I hide the stuff I'm supposed to recycle in the regular trash. Sorry, but I'm not washing out the disposable tin pans. I switched to black garbage bags so the collectors and ticket people wont see.