Your Questions About Recycling

The Expert answers:

We generate less than one 30 l trash bag a week of garbage. We compost our kitchen waste, recycle plastic, glass, paper, cardboard, and most metal. We burn wood to heat our home, so any trees or trimmings get burned. We also have a vege garden, and grow our own beef and lamb. I got rid of the chickens after many years of keeping them as it wasn’t cost-effective to have them here in NZ with the price of feed so high; even with feeding them kitchen waste I can buy free range eggs for just a bit more than I was spending.
It doesn’t take that much effort to do the recycling thing…it just gets to be a habit, like anything else.

The Expert answers:

Well you might think this is crazy but I remember in second grade making a wreath out of a wire hanger and garbage bags. Sounds awful but it actually looked really good! Just cut up some of the green lawn and leaf bags into strips about 1 inch wide by 5 inches long. Shape your hanger into a circle. Start tying the strips of garbage bags on. Just one knot in the center of each strip. Every time you tie 10 strips or so, push them together as tight as you can, you need the strips to be jam packed together to get a nice full-looking wreath. It will take a while but you can do it watching TV, and it’s a great thing for kids or others to help with. Here is a link with more instructions and pictures:

http://www.ehow.com/how_4600040_wreath-trash-bags-hanger.html

I’m also a huge fan of string of popcorn and cranberry. Just get a needle and some thread. Pop some popcorn and buy some whole cranberries. Thread the needle and use it to “sew” the cranberries and popcorn onto the thread. You can use all cranberries if you think the popcorn is too messy.

Try checking out http://www.marthastewart.com/ as well.

Good luck and merry christmas!

The Expert answers:

I recycle a lot of things: plastic bottles, dry paper, cartons, tin cans, and stuff go to the junk shop (they buy it cheap but it’s worth getting rid of all unneeded stuff at home); i give away used CLEAN plastic sando bags to the wet market, i wash those that are soiled and use it as garbage bag.

I manually shred foil packs (the ones they use in chips and curls) during my free time and while watching tv and use it to make throw pillows. They’re not as soft as cotton filled ones, but they are as cuddly.

In the office, i sort paper whether it has print on both sides or not. Those who have one side blank are used for forms that are used inside the office (like visitor passes and trasfer forms) while those with both sides printed are shredded and sold to the junk shop.

I use waste water from doing the laundry to water plants and flush the toilet. The soapy water is used to clean up the bathroom tiles, and the water from rinsing is used to rinse the cleaned tiles.

My mom conducts recycling seminars in our province, and you bet she does the seminar at home before anywhere else 🙂

The Expert answers:

It depends on the council and area – different councils use different colour bags, and some don’t use any other than black (recycling goes in boxes instead)

The Expert answers:

Its back and forth. Lets face it, recycling is a rip off to the consumer. Some recycle centers don’t actually have separate dumping area’s, so the separating you do for the bins is sometimes in some area’s a waste of time.

Secondly, Since I live in California, I notice that I pay for that 5 cent deposit fee when I buy my groceries, then the city comes along and expects separation of garbage and to take my recycleables away for free ? Even with todays electronics you are forced to pay for a ‘recycling free’ or ‘disposal fee’. So your basically paying it forward when you buy the item. Absolutely NO incentive to be part of a city recycling program…………….other than to make yourself feel good for pitching in and being responsible.
Meanwhile, the bums that come sniffing around your trash cans on trash day are getting the largest benefit as they cash your cans that you paid for and cheat the city out of thier free money.

The Expert answers:

Not sure what you use for garbage bags. You could check at you local pet store soon i am sure they wll have something. I use bags in the cat box from the pet store so the litter box does not get nasty be i do not put it in the recycle bin. I do not know if they are recyclable just check at the petstore.

The Expert answers:

When shopping it sounds like you already know about reusables, but if you are serious about total elimination then for trash bags you need to switch to biodegradable bags such as the ones on the site below. Along with this switch the vast reduction of trash from watching what type of packaging the products you are buying have (favoring those with less packaging or recyclable packing) combined with recycling and composting (whether traditional or vermicomposting) should have your need for even the biodegradable bags to a minimum

The Expert answers:

Today, recycling, maintaining our sustainability and taking care of our environment is a big thing. While the best method is to reuse our wastes, this often cannot be done. Therefore, the only way to go seems to be to recycle, to use the same materials to make that same product again and again. While this seems to be a great idea, it is not always the case.

I usually carry a water bottle in my bag. I drink bottled water not because I believe it is safer or cleaner than tap water; but rather merely out of convenience. It allows me to have quick access to water when I’m not near a bubbler or a fast-food restaurant. I also refill my water bottle whenever possible. This is reusing waste products, and therefore the best way to sustain our environment. However, water bottles break. When it is broken, I throw it in the rubbish bins provided, NOT the recycling bin. Why?

I think that recycling is somewhat a pointless exercise. It is not totally useless though. I recycle aluminium cans and such. The reason why I recycle aluminium cans and not plastics bottles will be discussed later.

In the New York Times, John Tierney wrote an article called “Recycling is Garbage”. In that article, he declared that “Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources”. In the article, he points out many things. For instance, packaging saves resources, reducing food spoilage. Fast-food meals generate less trash per person than home-cooked meals. Also, the cheapest way to dispose of garbage is in a landfill.

Recycling, however, costs a lot of money. The time, effort and money spent on picking materials and sorting them out costs more than it would cost to dump it in landfill. Then it would have to be re-processed. Tierney figures that the value of the labour of recycling to be literally hundreds of dollars per ton more.

People might say that landfills are taking too much space. However, it is a common myth. A. Clark Wiseman of Spokane’s Gonzaga University figures that, at the current rate, Americans could put all of the trash generated over the next 1,000 years into a landfill 91 m high and 56 km square or dig a similar-size hole and plant grass on top after it was filled. America has an area of 9,631,418 square km. I doubt they will have trouble finding an area to dump their rubbish. Some people might be worried that this landfill is hazardous and potentially lethal to the environment. An easy solution to this is to shoot off the rubbish into space. All we need to do is provide that much space for rubbish and shoot it off to space once every a thousand years.

People also say that we are going to run out of resources in the near future, they are wrong. Resources on earth are not scarce at all. WorldWatch, a group which has constantly predicted the near future when humans will run out of resources, now acknowledges: “The question of scarcity may never been the most important one”.

People think that recycling paper saves trees. This is wrong. Paper is made from trees which are specifically grown to be chopped down to be turned into paper. It has the same concept as a chicken farm. Australians eat 1 billion chickens every year. And yet, chicken is not an endangered species. This is because we farm chicken. If we are to hunt chickens from the woods and still eat the same amount of chicken, chicken will be extinct in a matter of hours. The same goes for trees. We ‘farm’ trees the same way we farm chickens. Recycling paper doesn’t save trees. As a matter of fact, recycling paper does more harm to the environment than to just make paper freshly from trees. The process of transporting used paper, sorting different types of paper and many other processes involved in recycling paper produces a lot more pollution than just chopping down trees and turning them into paper. The only real way to reduce paper consumption is to read the content of the paper over and over again. A fully-grown oak tree soaks in about 380 L of water a day. That is a lot of water. However, this oak tree does not only consume water, it also eats greenhouse gases and helps purify the air. On the contrary, if everybody stops using paper all of a sudden, we will eventually destroy those trees and use the area for something else. So in fact, throwing away paper saves trees. More paper demand means more trees will be planted and therefore cleaner air.

The Expert answers:

It depends on if there is a facility in your vicinity that can process that kind of plastic wrap. I live in a pretty “green” area, and I’ve never heard of soft or cellophane type plastic being recycled, except for grocery store bags–and I’m not sure that actually happens considering how many end up in the ocean.
Look up your local waste management/recycling service provider online and see if they say that they accept anything besides shampoo bottles and milk jugs.