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Recycling Guidance

Recycle, Reuse, Reduce

Recycling helps our environment tremendously by saving room in our landfills and reducing energy needed to create new products. 

Here's what you can recycle:
  1. Paper:  This includes newspaper and everything that comes in it, magazines, colored paper and all junk mail that is delivered to your home.
  2. Plastic:  All hard plastics labeled with numbers 1 through 7 including nursery pots, yogurt containers and even toys are recyclable!
  3. Metal:  Steel, aluminum, aluminum foil etc. are all recyclable. 
  4. Glass:  All food & beverage containers
  5. Cardboard:  Flattened boxes
Here's what you can't:
  1. Batteries:· Batteries contain heavy metals like mercury, nickel, lead and cadmium, which can contaminate the environment if improperly disposed of.
  2. Styrofoam:
  3. Waxed Cardboard:
To go above and beyond simply recycling try rinsing out all food and drink containers and flatten all cardboard boxes.  Doing this reduces the amount of time it takes for items to go through the cleaning and breakdown process at the recycling plant.  Reducing this time reduces the amount of financial resources needed to pay for this time.

DID YOU KNOW?
PAPER
  • More space can be saved in our landfills by recycling paper products than any other materials.
  • Each piece of paper can be recycled up to 5 times before the fibers become weak.
  • Every day 44 million newspapers are thrown away in the trash.  That's the equivalent of throwing 500,000 trees in the landfill every week.
  • Each ton of recycled paper can save 17 trees, 380 gallons of oil and 7,000 gallons of water.
  • If each person were to reuse a paper shopping bag for just one trip to the store, we would save 60,000 trees.
ALUMINIUM
  • It takes about 95% less energy to make aluminum from recycled aluminum than to make it from raw materials.
  • Recycling a single aluminum can saves enough energy to power your television for three hours or to run a 100-watt light bulb for almost four hours.
  • aluminum dumped into our landfills today will remain there for over 200 years.
 
PLASTICS
  • Plastic bags made from recycled polythene rather than virgin materials save two thirds of the energy required for production and reduce the water used by almost 90%.
  • Recycling is still important however, because there are many items that can be made from recycled plastics. These items include garbage cans, picnic tables, fiber-fill for vests and jackets, traffic cones and many others. 5 Purchasing items such as these that are made from recycled materials will help to further support this industry.
  • Although food and yard trimmings are biodegradable these often sit for long periods of time unable to be broken down through the plastic bags they are stored in.
 
GLASS:
 
  • Glass is 100% recyclable and can go from the recycling bin to a store shelf in as little as 30 days!
  • Glass can be reused an infinite number of times.
  • Recycling one ton of glass saves the equivalent of nine gallons of fuel oil and one sixth of a ton of carbon dioxide!
  • Making a glass container from a recycled container creates about 20% less air pollution, 50% less water pollution and uses only about half the energy of making it from virgin materials.
  • Recycling a single glass bottle can save enough energy to light a 100-watt light bulb for 4 hours!
 
STYROFOAM
 
  • Each year Americans throw away 25 trillion Styrofoam cups. This is enough to circle the earth 436 times.
  • Harmful chemicals are released into the atmosphere during the production of Styrofoam. These chemicals have been shown to degrade the Earth’s ozone layer. 10
 
WAXED CARDBOARD
 
  • Waxed cardboard cannot be recycled. It can only be recycled as mixed paper and many recycling plants will not even accept it meaning that it will end up in the trash.
Do you know of any other products that are or aren't recyclable?

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