1. Recycle
Does recycling really make a difference? The answer is a resounding yes!
Besides conserving energy and natural resources, recycling reduces the amount of landfill space needed and creates five times as many jobs as landfilling does. So, first reduce, them reuse, then recycle, recycle, recycle!
What You Should Know
- Americans throw away 40,000 plastic bottles and 50,000 plastic bags every minute.
- Contrary to popular belief, recycling does not use more energy than manufacturing a brand-new product. Making recycled paper uses 55%-75% less energy than making virgin paper, making things out of recycled plastic uses 60%-75% less energy, and making products out of recycled aluminum uses 95% less energy!
- For every soda can you recycle, you’ll prevent 1 pound of carbon dioxide from being emitted. If you recycle your newspaper every day, you’ll prevent 100 pounds of CO2 from being emitted each year.
- In the last 30 years, the U.S. recycling rate has quadrupled, but the amount of trash we send to landfills has actually gone up–by 33%! So while we’re recycling more than ever, we’re also throwing away more than ever.
- Americans use 187,000 tons of paper every day. For every ton of office paper we recycle, we prevent 17 trees from being cut down.
- Each year 200 million gallons of used motor oil are dumped on the ground, sent to landfills (after being thrown in the garbage), or poured down the drain by Americans - that’s enough oil to fill 120 Exxon Valdezes! By contrast, if we recycled all that used oil, we would be able to import 1.3 million fewer barrels of oil a day.
- With all the steel and tin cans Americans use in one day, you could build a steel pipe from Los Angeles to New York and back.
Check out Green Waste’s list of what you can and cannot recycle with your weekly garbage pickup.
Easy Things You Can Do
Recycle the usual. That means all of your paper (newspapers, cardboard, paperboard used for cereal and other dry food boxes, magazines, juice boxes, milk cartons, grocery bags, etc.), glass (bottles and jars of any color glass), steel and aluminum (soda, beer, and soup cans and their caps or lids), and plastic (jugs and bottles, some bags). Get multiple smaller garbage cans to make separating your recyclables easier. And don’t forget to add paper recycling bins to your home office and other rooms where paperwork is done.
Recycle the not-so-usual. Put your used motor oil into a clean milk jug, label it, and take it to your nearest oil change or auto parts store to be recycled. Green Waste can give you a container for your old oil.
Give your old car tires to the store where you buy your new ones, and make sure they recycle them. Try to donate any wood you have or look up a local tree removal service and ask if they’ll take it. Collect disposable batteries, compact fluorescent light bulbs (which contain mercury), oil-based paint, and expired medications (that’s right, never dump medicines down the toilet or sink!) to your local household hazardous waste collection center. It’s very important to keep all of these items from leaking hazardous chemicals into our landfills and leaching toxins into our groundwater. You can store these things in your closet or basement and simply make one trip every six months.
Recycle your coolant. Did you know that chlorofluorocarbons (CFC’s) not only eat away at the ozone layer, but they’re also potent greenhouse gases that cause global warming? Leaky home and car air conditioners (which contain CFC’s in their coolant fluid) make up the largest single source of CFC’s in the U.S. That’s because a typical car air conditioner leaks the equivalent of 200 pounds of carbon dioxide every year.
- Ask your service person to check for leaks and to capture and recycle the coolant when you have your car tuned-up or your home air conditioner serviced.
- By law, before throwing any appliance away that contains CFC’s or coolants (refrigerators, air conditioners, etc.) you must have a professional capture and recyclethe toxic coolant. If the appliance is still in working condition, donate it. If not, call your Sanitation Department for help.
Recycle the big stuff. Steel can be remelted an infinite number times without degrading its quality, which is why the automobile recycling industry is doing so well ($8.2 billion in annual sales and producing enough recycled steel to manufacture 95% of all new cars). Donate your old car to a charity or sell it to a scrapyard.
When you’re getting a new roof, find a local recycling center that handles construction debris for help. Nine million tons of asphalt roofing shingles are dumped into our nation’s landfills each year, costing us $400 million in disposal costs. It’s a waste, because these shingles can be recycled into road asphalt or new roofing shingles.
Identify your community recycling centers, and use them. Your community probably already provides a weekly curbside collection of recyclables or has designated drop-off or buyback centers. Ask what can be recycled, how, when, and if there are any rules and try to recycle everything they accept. If your community doesn’t have a recycling program, ask that they start one!
Source: 51 Easy Ways You Can Prevent Global Warming (and save money!) by Jeffrey Langholz, Ph.D. and Kelly Turner from