Environmental Recycling

Compost Bins Are Useful For Recycling Organic Materials

When you’re looking for a really good way to recycle much of your organic material and make it useful, you might want to consider using compost bins. This is a way that you can use all your salad greens, egg shells, coffee filters and coffee grinds and turn it into rich dirt for all your [...]

How the Price of Oil Impacts Recycling Practices

If there is one thing that greases the engine of society, it’s oil. The flow of cheap oil has had perhaps more impact on the creation of what many critics have termed as the “throwaway” society. When the price of oil goes up, so does transportation and just about everything else. The cost of hauling [...]

When Free Market Recycling Mechanisms Must be Tampered With

As was evidenced toward the end of 2008, free markets don’t always work as they’re supposed to without a bit if intervention. The same is true in the case of recycling. There would be no such thing as municipal recycling programs if it were not for public monies to help these industries get started. The [...]

Complimenting Recycling With Reusing

Recycling isn’t the most environmentally friendly game in town, but it’s a good start. If you really want to make your contribution to the environment go a lot further, you can simply get in the habit of reusing items instead of throwing them in the bins after a single use. There are many ways to [...]

Do Co-Mingled Recycling Schemes Result in Higher Recycling Rates?

In some areas, consumers are required to do all the sorting themselves, with recycling facilities merely checking their work on the other end. On the other extreme are programs where all the recycling is tossed together in a single bin to be sorted through with a combination of automated and human effort. Cities that practice [...]

Is Wood Really a Renewable Resource?

Wood is very often touted as a highly recyclable resource that is vastly superior for its ability to be simply regrown and eventually decompose when done. Depending upon the type used, it is relatively strong and sturdy for its weight. The energetics of wood in a marketplace that is temporally biased towards the short term [...]

Recycling Broken Concrete Into Urbanite Gaining Support

The recycling of broken concrete into new materials, often called “urbanite,” is gaining a great deal of support among sustainable builders and local authorities, alike. Typically the broken concrete pieces are put in a crushing machine and reduced to smaller pieces that can be used as the aggregate in new concrete. Old rebar can simply [...]

Are We Really Running Out of Landfill Space?

Since the most massive shut down of sanitary landfill spaces in US history in 1993, there have been very few new landfills created to take on an ever-increasing total volume of waste. Though rates of recycling have gone up considerably since then, the total rate of waste generation has also increased, to make the level [...]

Plastic Resin Identification Codes On Plastic Containers

No doubt you’ve seen them on the bottom or top of plastic containers – the little numbers contained in a triangular, three-arrowed recycling symbol. These “plastic numbers” are a simple code that tells you what sort of plastic you’re dealing with, just in case you don’t have a degree in organic chemistry. They were adopted [...]

Supporting Recycling With Your Purchases

Since recycling is a market-based solution to a public problem, improvements to it are similarly market-based whenever possible. That’s why recycling programs are most likely to be profitable and have the capital to improve when demand for recycled products is high. This can be legislated to a certain extent. For instance, there are many states [...]