Recycling

Battery Disposal

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 17:54:00 GMT

Batteries are also considered a hazardous waste, but they CANNOT be placed in recycling or trash. What do I do with them??? It’s easy, just keep a zip lock bag near your penny jar at home and turn them in at no cost to the numerous collection locations listed below.

1. Some retailers in your city have household battery drop-offs (Interstate All Battery Center)

2. The Household Toxics Facility is open Thursday through Saturday each week. The Facility is located at the Sonoma County Central Disposal Site at 500 Mecham Road in Petaluma. They are open from 7:30 am 2:30 pm. No appointment is necessaryfor residents. For business drop off information call 795-2025 or toll-free 1-877-747-1870.

3. Each week there is a Community Toxics Collection event in a different city in Sonoma County. Please call 795-2025 or toll-free 1-877-747-1870 to make an appointment.

Sonoma County's Waste Management Agency Guide

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 19:10:00 GMT

The Sonoma County Waste Management Agency’s annual Recycling Guide is a 32-page comprehensive resource answering questions about recycling, hazardous waste and other disposal issues for Sonoma County. Visit the online version of the Recycling Guide on the Agency’s web site.

Learn about

Toxics Disposal—where to properly dispose of items such as batteries, fluorescent lamps, garden chemicals and automotive fluids

Curbside Recycling—what you can put in each cart

Motor Oil/filter Recycling—find a drop-off recycling location for motor oil/filters

Drop-Off Recycling—get money for your bottles and cans at a California Redemption Value (CRV) drop-off center

Use the search function “What would you like to Recycle?” to find reuse and recycling options for building materials, printer cartridges, Styrofoam peanuts and much more!

About the Agency: The Sonoma County Waste Management Agency, formed in 1992, is the joint powers authority of the nine cities and the County of Sonoma. The specific focus of the agency's efforts is the implementation of the waste diversion programs as required by AB939 in the following categories: Wood Waste, Yard Debris, Household Hazardous Waste, Education and Planning.

If there are any other questions you can Call the Eco-Desk Hotline Hotline at 707-565-DESK (3375) or visit online recyclenow.org.

Recycling Fun Facts

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:19:00 GMT

Aluminum:
• Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV for three hours!
• 350,000 aluminum cans are produced every minute!
• More aluminum goes into beverage cans than any other product.
• Once an aluminum can is recycled, it can be part of a new can within six weeks.
• During the time it takes you to read this sentence, 50,000 12-ounce aluminum cans are made.
• There is no limit to the amount of times aluminum cans can be recycled.
• We use over 80,000,000,000 aluminum pop cans every year.
• At one time, aluminum was more valuable than gold?
Paper:
• To produce each week's Sunday newspaper, 500,000 trees must be cut down.
• If all our newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year!
• During World War II when raw materials were scarce, 33% of all paper was recycled. After the war, this number decreased sharply.
• Americans use 85,000,000 tons of paper a year: about 680 pounds per person.
• In 1993, U.S. paper recovery saved more than 90,000,000 cubic yards of landfill space.
• In 1993, nearly 36,000,000 tons of paper in the U.S.-twice as much in 1980.
• 27% of the newspapers produced in America are recycled.
• 544,000: Trees saved if every household in the United States replaced just one roll of virgin fiber paper towels (70 sheets) with 100 percent recycled ones.
• 20 million: Tons of electronic waste thrown away each year. One ton of scrap from discarded computers contains more gold than can be produced from 17 tons of gold ore.
• 9 cubic yards: Amount of landfill space saved by recycling one ton of cardboard.
• $160 billion: Value of the global recycling industry that employs over 1.5 million people.
• 79 million tons: Amount of waste material diverted away from disposal in 2005 through recycling and composting.
• 5 percent: Fraction of the energy it takes to recycle aluminum versus mining and refining new aluminum.
• 315 kg: Amount of carbon dioxide not released into the atmosphere each time a metric ton of glass is used to create new glass products.
• 98 percent: Percentage of glass bottles in Denmark that are refillable. 98 percent of those are returned by consumers for reuse.
• 51.5 percent: Percentage of the paper consumed in the U.S. that was recovered for recycling in 2005.

14 Reuses for Phone Books

Thu, 10 Sep 2009 03:01:00 GMT

I was reading a post over on Grist about how it may be time to ban large, printed phone directories. You know, those giant phone books that get dropped off on your doorstep multiple times per year (at least, that's been my experience. The Yellow Pages directory I get seems to publish new issues more often than some of my favorite magazines.) I can't think of the last time I looked for something in the phone book. I use Google instead.

The most disturbing part of the post over on Grist was seeing the statistic (as reported by WhitePages, an online phone directory) that less than 16 percent of Americans recycle their old phone books. In some cases, people don't think they can recycle them (you can! Most municipalities accept phone books for recycling now.) What a waste.

Recycling is great, but it would be even better to do two things:

* Check with your local phone company to see if they have an "opt-out" program. If they do, sign up for it. If they don't, suggest that they start one.

* Reuse the phone books you already have. Here are a few ideas for you.

Ideas for Reusing Phone Books

1. Make a super cute (and functional!) pencil holder.

2. Make a booster seat for your child. Most of us probably remember sitting on a phone book to reach the dining room table better. Go a step further and cover the phone book with some cotton batting and a fabric remnant to make it even more comfortable.

3. Use them, sheet by sheet, as an alternative to paper towels. Clean windows and mirrors. Go a step further and use your own homemade glass cleaner, too.

4. Have a fire place, outdoor fire pit, or charcoal grill? Use your phone book pages for kindling.

5. Crumple the pages into balls to use as packaging filler for delicate objects.

6. Next time your kid needs to papier mache something, use pages from your old phone books.

7. Shred or tear the pages and use them as bedding in your worm bin.

8. Or, shred the pages up and add them to your compost pile.

9. Use stacks of the pages (10 pages thick or so) to kill the grass where you want a new garden bed. Simply lay the stacks of pages over the grass (overlapping them a bit), wet them down, and cover them with mulch, shredded leaves, or straw. In a few weeks, the grass will be dead and you have a new garden bed!

10. Make a secret storage box for valuables out of a large phone book.

11. Use one as a kneeling pad for when you're working in the garden.

12. If you're ripening green tomatoes (or storing fruits such as apples long-term) wrap each fruit in a page from the phone book and store wrapped fruit in a box in a cool, dry place.

13. Make envelopes from them. These are especially good for storing seeds that you save from your garden because you can make them in any shape or size you need.

14. Make pots for seed starting. You usually see this tip with newspapers, but it works just as well with pages from your phone directory.

Recycling plastics; What the numbers mean

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 16:39:00 GMT

On most plastic jars, containers and other packaging of products you buy, you'll find what's generally accepted as the recycling logo with a number in the middle and sometimes letters underneath stamped into the plastic.

The recycling logo can be a little misleading - just about anything can be recycled, but sometimes not without major effort. It's a little bit like extracting oil from under the ocean bed compared to extracting oil from tar sands; none of it's really good as such, but some plastics are far, far worse than others.

The Society of the Plastics Industry (SPI) implemented the system in 1988 to allow recyclers to be able to tell the different types of plastics when sorting. Basically, the numbers in the triangle indicate the grade of plastic - the resin ID code. It's now a system that's used in many different countries.

The following is what to look for and what it all means. If you're in a rush, you might like to download my free plastics recycling cheat sheet (PDF) - it's a handy tool you can print out and pin up where you have your garbage and recycling bins - and saves you having to remember what each code signifies.

1 - PETE - Polyethylene Terephthalate

The easiest of plastics to recycle. Often used for soda bottles, water bottles and many common food packages. Is recycled into bottles and polyester fibers

2 - HDPE - High density Polyethylene

Also readily recyclable - Mostly used for packaging detergents, bleach, milk containers, hair care products and motor oil. Is recycled into more bottles or bags.

3 - PVC - Polyvinyl Chloride

This stuff is everywhere - pipes, toys, furniture, packaging - you name it. Difficult to recycle and PVC is a major environmental and health threat.

4 - LDPE Low-density Polyethylene

Used for many different kinds of wrapping, grocery bags and sandwich bags and can be recycled into more of the same.

5 - PP - Polypropylene

Clothing, bottles, tubs and ropes. Can be recycled into fibers.

6 - PS - Polystyrene

Cups, foam food trays, packing peanuts. Polystyrene (also known as styrofoam) is a real problem as it's bulky yet very lightweight and that makes it difficult to recycle. For example, a carload of expanded polystyrene would weigh next to nothing so there's not a lot of materials to reclaim, particularly when you take into account the transport getting it to the point of recycling. It can however be reused.

7 - Other

Could be a mixture of any and all of the above or plastics not readily recyclable such as polyurethane. Avoid it if you can - recyclers generally speaking don't want it.

North Bay Corporation's Recycling Guide

Mon, 06 Apr 2009 16:04:00 GMT

Recycle Brochure

What you CAN recycle

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:25:00 GMT

Paper Products
• Corrugated Cardboard
• Newspaper (including all inserts)
• Magazines, junk mail, envelopes and catalogs
• Office & computer paper, household stationery
• Telephone books and manuals
• Cereal, shoe, cracker & tissue boxes (remove liners)
• No plastic coated paper
• No food contaminated paper
• No hardcover books (paperbacks are OK)

Milk Cartons, Juice and Soy/Rice Milk Boxes
• Empty milk cartons, juice boxes and other aseptic containers
• No liquids or food waste

Glass Bottles and Jars
• Food and beverage glass containers only
• No ceramic, light bulbs, window glass or mirrors

Metal Cans
• All aluminum and steel (i.e. "tin"), food and beverage cans
• Other cans such as paint and aerosol cans are recyclable only if they are completely empty and dry

Plastic Containers
• Household plastic containers only
• No styrofoam or plastic bags
• No plastic pipe, buckets, sheeting, tarps, pads, furniture, pools, baby bathtubs, toys, hangers, etc.

What you CAN"T recycle

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:25:00 GMT

Do not place the following items in your recycling container:
• Plastic bags
• Styrofoam
• Garbage
• Liquid waste
• Food contaminated paper
• Plastic items that are not containers
• Window glass
• Lightbulbs
• Ceramic
• Hazardous waste including:
• Motor Oil or Filters
• Automotive Batteries
• Solvents
• Paints and thinners
• Pesticides and herbicides

Making use of your mountain of plastic bags

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:21:00 GMT

• Use them as bin liners.
• Place them in the bottom of plant pots and hanging baskets - they act as great drainage systems.
• Children can use them for carrying PE gear to school.
• Scrunch them up to surround items when you're packaging as an alternative to bubble wrap.
• Use them in the garden to hold your grass cuttings and hedge trimmings before transfer to a compost bin.
• Use them when packing for a holiday to keep dirty/wet clothes and shoes away from dry clothing.
• Use them as 'doggy doo bags' when out walking your dog!
• Some supermarkets recycle plastic bags, so you can return plastic bags to them.
• Re-use washed zip lock bags for sandwiches and snacks rather than using plastic wrap.

Ideas for recycling paper

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 16:20:00 GMT

• After children's drawings and paintings have been displayed for a while they can be used to wrap presents - this also makes the present special.
• Discarded A4-sized paper can be cut and stapled together to make notepads. Alternatively, if you save five reams, it will cost you about $5 to get a print company to convert this paper into 'proper' notepads.
• 'Use the envelopes you receive in the mail a second time by placing a new address label over the last address. I call this the OMT System ("One more time system"). Old envelopes can also be used for scribbling down shopping lists, to-do lists, and notes.'
• Resealable envelopes can be reused many times: 'My daughter takes one to school when she orders her lunch. The envelope has all details written in felt on the front and the money sealed inside. She brings the envelope home and we use it again until it gets too shabby.'
• Old calendars, colourful pictures, etc. can be used to make your own envelopes. You can unstick a used envelope and use it as a template for making envelopes.
• Old rolls of wallpaper can be used for childrens' drawings.
• Junk mail can be used as scrap paper, or as bedding for pets.
• Cardboard cartons can be used to collect paper for recycling, instead of plastic bags (even breakfast cereal cartons are good).
• SPCA and pet shops appreciate old newspapers.
• Toilet roll centres can be recycled - they're made of cardboard.
• To fill in a rainy day get a paper recycling kit and get the kids to rip up old used paper to make recycled paper, it can be great fun.
• Old magazines are appreciated by:
o Doctor and dentists' surgeries
o Motels
o Friends