How to Recycle in Just 15 Minutes a Day

This is a guest post by R. Beechum.

It takes approximately 700 years for a plastic bottle to completely decompose in a landfill. Sadly, about 50 percent of the waste present in landfills today is made up of those same plastic bottles. Meaning that unless you’ve bought a ticket on The Axiom (from the eco-themed movie Wall*E), this might be a good time to learn a thing or two about recycling.

Recycling in the past could be a time-consuming task that involved washing out cans and bottles, removing labels, buying separate trash cans and sorting, sorting, sorting.

But it doesn’t have to be that difficult.

If you’ve been a reluctant recycler all your life because the task seems too time-consuming or daunting, well, in the classic words of Bob Dylan: “The times, they are a changin’.”

By learning some tricks of the recycling trade, you can help the planet without spending your whole day over the sink rinsing out spaghetti sauce jars.

Donate

You might not think there’s anyone out there who wants your old belongings, but you’d be wrong. Many local organizations, churches, schools and re-use centers are happy to take the following recyclable items:

• Eyeglasses
• Old cell phones, pagers and other electronics
• Out-grown clothing in wearable condition
• Indoor and outdoor paint
• Leftover floor tiles
• Old windows
• Scrap metal (in Rhode Island, you get cash for scrap metal!)

Although you might be tempted to toss items like these in the dumpster, doing so can be detrimental to the environment, wasteful and even illegal in some circumstances. Take just 15 minutes a day to call around and find out who can use what. In many instances, the organization will even arrange to pick it up.

Compost

Take a few minutes to learn about composting. Compost comprised of fruit and vegetable peels, coffee grounds, egg shells, tea bags, corn husks, cut flowers, yard waste and hair makes your garden grow. These types of refuse attract beneficial critters like earthworms that tunnel through your soil and loosen and help fertilize it. Gardeners call this earthy concoction “black gold” because it’s so valuable to plants and flowers.

The easiest way to begin composting is to keep a sealed container on your kitchen countertop and add to it throughout the day. Anytime you peel a potato or empty the coffeepot, add it to your container. At the end of the day, take 15 minutes to walk it out to your compost pile and dump it in.

Repurpose

Projects that “up-cycle” old containers such as coffee cans, fruit crates, cracked dishes and aluminum pie plates are a form of recycling. If you’re not a crafter yourself, check with friends, family and the art department of the local school to see if they need any of these items. In just 15 minutes a day, you can use tile nippers to cut old cracked saucers into tiles for mosaics, paint coffee cans to hold art supplies or mount casters on an old fruit crate to make a rolling storage bin.

It comes down to this: recycling isn’t limited to glass, plastic and cardboard anymore. And it doesn’t take much time. Every time you have a yard sale or donate your kid’s outgrown books to the local library, you’re recycling. When your neighbor turns a defunct piece of farm machinery into a mailbox, he’s recycling too. There are a million and one ways to keep unwanted items out of landfills, and every time you think up a new one, you’re recycling.

About the Author: R. Beechum is a busy mother of two. She is trying to make the environment a better place for her children and recycles with Ideal Services.