Recycling household waste when you don’t have the service

[Teacher Terry]

My friend’s elderly mom had some cell phones that she was going to throw away because she couldn’t figure out where to recycle them after a few phone calls. I took them and googled it. I dropped them off on my way home. We also have a dump that’s free if you show your garbage bill. Mainly we just aren’t buying anything and donating what we don’t need. When I go to Poland I will buy a few new clothes because they are cheap, last forever and the styles are totally different. I did that 5 years ago and am still wearing the clothes.

[SteveinMN]

Used grocery bags at least here can be recycled at the market..

Around here Goodwill is happy to see clean used plastic shopping bags. Maybe other thrift stores are, too. I periodically take the ones we end up with, despite our best efforts, and just walk them to a cashier. That's all you have to do, even if one is not a GW fan (I know some folks are not).

Used clothes

There are some kiosks in store parking lots near our house which accept used clothing; what they cannot resell as clothing is bundled, shredded, and sold as raw material for "green" house insulation. Denim is particularly coveted for this (not sure why).

Used tires and oil are usually recycled by garages. Ask your mechanic.

Garages do need to pay for their tires and oil to be recycled (though there's an edge case of shops and other people who can burn "waste oil" for heat), so I don't know as I'd get a set of tires shipped on-line and then ask the tech to recycle the old ones for me. OTOH if the tech is the one who mounts the new tires on wheels, maybe that's not so bad. My tech will swap/rotate tires twice a year for free if I buy the tires from him, which makes his price for the life of the tires cheaper than anything I can find elsewhere, even on-line. And solves the problem of disposal for me.

Find out what you can take to your local dump.

Our county prints (and mails to every single trash/recycling customer; way to improve that ol' green score ) a booklet of what's accepted curbside and what is accepted at designated locations. Their Web site also lets you find places in town that accept hard-to-recycle items like carpet, compact fluorescent bulbs, etc.

[catherine]

Find out what you can take to your local dump, would probably be where I'd start, then go on from there. At one point, we would save our metal and glass and drive it out to the local military posts dump. They accepted recycles from the "townies" but not our garbage.

I love our dump. Sounds so weird, but when we moved here, we debated whether we should have private trash pick up every other week, or take it once a week to the "transfer station" (i.e, dump). We opted for the latter. It's not far from our house, and it doesn't take long to round up the garbage, recyclables, brush, and bigger things like used tires and construction debris and take it there ourselves.

What that does is make you more mindful when you have carry and cart all the crap you used throughout the week. But I also like it because it's "one-stop dumping"--we swing around from station to station, from large bulk items, to brush, to garbage to recycling of glass, plastic and paper and then we're done.

[Teacher Terry]

We only make one bag of garbage a week. However our recycling is one half to 3/4 full every 2 weeks.

[Rogar]

I noticed that one of our local urban farmers was advertising for people to bring their old Christmas trees in to feed to their goats. They contract with the city in warmer months to use their goats for weed control in some of the open spaces. Boy, there's some roughage in Christmas trees.

[SteveinMN]

Boy, there's some roughage in Christmas trees.

Also maybe tinsel and remnants of hangers. Wonder whose job it is to go through the trees and make sure they're clean?

[Rogar]

Also maybe tinsel and remnants of hangers. Wonder whose job it is to go through the trees and make sure they're clean?

They were specific about removing tinsel and any other remnants of decoration. I think I can recall hearing of goats eating tin cans, so maybe a few remnants are not a big deal?

[happystuff]

What that does is make you more mindful when you have carry and cart all the crap you used throughout the week.

This is an excellent point! I imagine there would be significant changes in products, packaging, recycling, etc. if people were more mindful and more personally responsible for disposal beyond hauling the can to the curb.

[razz]

Nope, before we had garbage collection, garbage was simply thrown out of windows on country roads or down ravines. Mindfulness is going to take some education at the manufacturing level that recognizes the lack of motivation on the consumer's part.

[kib]

Tradd: "I’ve called my town and they referred me to the town’s contracted trash hauler, who can’t help me since they don’t service my complex and don’t deal with individuals."

When I lived without a recycling program, I would drop off my recycling in the dumpster of a commercial office. Not particularly convenient but I got around the "we don't service individuals" issue. Maybe you can find out who they Do service and piggyback off them?

***

Cradle-to-cradle recycling is basically having a system that's actually set up to take just about everything that's lived its useful life, break it down as little as necessary and turn it back into useful products, over and over. Inorganic composting, if you will. It also can refer to things like returnable milk bottles that are reused an almost infinite number of times.

I see this as the answer to the garbage crisis, but it probably needs to happen in conjunction with a. more durable durable goods, and b. somewhat more local production - global warming seriously isn't served by shipping things constantly from one place to another, no matter how worthy the cause.

Do you think we could ever turn back time this much? What are our other alternatives?