Recycling 101

Hello Readers,

   Today for my first post I want to talk to you about recycling, and how easy it can be. I know that a lot of people think that recycling is hard, or time consuming, but it really isn’t as hard as you might think. Just to give you an idea as to how important recycling is, here are some facts according to dosomething.org

1.     The average person generates over 4 pounds of trash every day and about 1.5 tons of solid waste per year.

2.    Over 75% of waste is recyclable, but we only recycle 30% of it.

3.    Americans throw away 25,000,000 plastic bottles every HOUR!

4.    If every American recycled just one-tenth of their newspapers, we could save 25 MILLION trees each year.

5.    We generate 21.5 million tons of food waste each year. If we composted that food, it would reduce the same amount of greenhouse gas as taking 2 million cars off the road.

These just a few examples as to how important recycling can be. Something as easy as recycling your plastic bottles, can make such a huge impact on our WONDERFUL planet. Some might ask, “How do we recycle?” That’s easy! Most cities, like Troy, give out special bags for you to put your recycled materials in. These are the blue bags that the garbage man leaves on your trashcans after they dumped them. Use these bags for you plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and paper products. Then next week when the garbage man comes to pick up your regular trash, they will pick up your recycled material and send it off to be recycled for you.

How much easier can it be?

Now if your like me and you live in an apartment, you can pick up FREE blue bags at City Hall, Public Library, Senior Complex, Troy Rec Center, and other locations as well. Once you have your blue bags, just sort out what you want to recycle and then when you take out your regular trash place your blue bags outside the dumpster and the garbage man will pick it up when they empty the dumpster.

Now for those of you asking, what all can I recycle? The answer is practically everything! You can recycle cardboard boxes, newspapers, plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and much more. This link will give you a more in-depth list of everything that you can recycle in Troy. http://www.troyal.gov/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/City-of-Troy-Recycling-flyer.pdf

For those of you who live else where, you can contact your City Hall and ask them about their rules and regulations for recycling, or do what I do, and Google it. J 

I hope that you found this blog about recycling helpful, and hopefully it will inspire and motivate you to start recycling at your house!

This is the only planet we have, lets keep her healthy!

Peace & Love,

Sarah “Hawk Eye” Graham