Where do you recycle?

Here are a couple of sights that will give you a directory of places to go to recycle almost anything.

Shawnee County website has a map with all the recycling centers.

Keep America Beautiful - Topeka/ Shawnee County has a directory under Recycling

What can you recycle?

Aluminum Cans

  • Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to run a TV or computer for three hours.
  • An aluminum can that is thrown away will still be a can 500 years from now.
  • There is no limit to the number of times that aluminum can be recycled.
  • A 60 watt light bulb can be run for over a day on the amount of energy saved by recycling 1 pound of steel.

Paper

  • Approximately 1 billion trees worth of paper are thrown away every year in the U.S.
  • Recycling a 1 yard tall stack of newspapers folded in half, saves the equivalent of one tree.
  • 52% of all paper was recovered for recycling in 2007.

Plastic

  • Americans use 2,500,000 plastic bottles every hour.  Most of them are thrown away.
  • One extra large t-shirt is made from 5 two liter PET plastic bottles
  • It takes 36 two liter bottles to make one square yard of carpet.

Glass

  • Every month we throw out enough glass bottles and jars to fill a skyscraper.  All of these jars are recyclable.
  • The energy saved from recycling one glass bottle can run a 100 watt light bulb for 4 hours.
  • A modern glass bottle would take 4,000 years or more to decompose.
  • Glass is 100% recyclable.  It saves raw materials, energy, and reduces waste in landfills.

Cardboard

  • A single box can be recycled up to  8 times.

Tires

  • There are 325 million tires produced annually.  32 million recycled by RMD Americas, LLC.
  • Tires collect water that stagnates, and becomes a breeding ground for mosquitoes.

Miscellaneous

  • Rainforests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute.
  • A single quart of motor oil, if disposed of improperly, can contaminate up to 2,000,000 gallons of fresh water.
  • You can 1 walk mile along an average highway in the U.S. and see over 1,400 pieces of litter.

If you do recycle where does it go?

Aluminum cans? - Makes more aluminum cans—can be recycled over and over again

Steel cans? - Other steel cans, appliances, cars

#1 plastic? - Clothing, carpet,

#2 plastic? - Carpet, other plastic containers, plastic lumber, water bottles

Phone books? - Tubes for dinner rolls, shingles, toilet paper

Newspapers - More paper

Some shocking landfill facts

 

  • 75% of our trash can be recycled
  • About one-third of an average dump is made up of packaging material!
  • Every year, each American throws out about 1,200 pounds of organic garbage that can be composted.
  • The U.S. is the #1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year. This means that 5% of the world’s people generate 40% of the world’s waste.
  • The highest point in Ohio is “Mount Rumpke,” which is actually a mountain of trash at the Rumpke sanitary landfill!
  • If you don’t recycle consider REPURPOSING (one of my favorite new words). Here are some books to get you and your kids started. Have you “repurposed anything fun” share your story.