Living Like Ed by Ed Jr. (whitelam books .txt) 📗

chop up. Even so, I fill one or two green bins with stuff every week, because it’s a big property with lots of drought-tolerant plants and lots of shrubby stuff—things with thick branches and stalks that I can’t compost.

What about the black bin, the stuff that goes to the landfill? On a weekly basis my black bin is usually one-eighth to one-quarter full. It’s never even half filled. There’s just not a lot of trash to be thrown out in this house. When I was single, there was even less—so little it would fit in my car’s glove compartment! Now that there are more people with different habits living in the house, we do produce more trash, but still, we send very little to the landfill.

So what goes in our black bin? Things that simply cannot be recycled, like used kitty litter. You can’t recycle or compost that. There also comes a point where you’ve gotta throw some things away. Things that Freecycle won’t even take. When you’ve got a vegan tennis shoe that is tattered and the heel has come off and you’ve reglued it several times and it’s now torn, nobody wants that. If you give this stuff to Goodwill, you’re just making them work to throw your stuff away; they’ve got to pick it up and then pay the trash disposal cost to get rid of it. So be honest about what can be reused. Still, you’ll find—as I have—that most things you want to get rid of have some value to someone. Empty soup cans, glass jars from pasta sauce, yesterday’s newspaper—they all have value. So now let’s look at these different kinds of materials and see how they can be recycled.

RECYCLING METAL

Obviously, there are many different kinds of metal—aluminum, steel, copper, gold, to name just a few—and most of them can be recycled.

You likely will have lots of aluminum to recycle, since 99 percent of all beer cans and 97 percent of all soft drink cans are made of aluminum.

Now, you may not want to put those cans in your curbside recycling bin, because many states offer a cash value for those empty cans. They’re not really paying you, of course; they’re just refunding your money. They charge something like a 5¢ deposit for each can when you buy a six-pack or a twelve-pack. Then when you bring the empty cans back, they refund your deposit. Either way—whether you collect the cash or throw the cans into your curbside recycling bin so your city can collect the cash—those aluminum cans will get recycled.

Fortunately, aluminum is easy to recycle. You don’t have to remove any labels. You just rinse out the cans. When it’s recycled, aluminum gets processed at such a high temperature that it easily eliminates contaminants. You rinse the stuff primarily to prevent odors and make life easier on all the people who have to touch that can after you’re done with it—the people who sort all the stuff that goes in the recycling bin, and then later, the people at the plant that recycles the aluminum.

Where does that aluminum get reused? To make more cans, mostly.

What about steel? Believe it or not, more steel gets recycled each year than all other materials combined, including paper. This is due in part to the fact that you can attract steel with a magnet. So it’s easy to sort it out when it’s mixed in with other materials. Steel can be salvaged fairly easily even if it’s mixed in with construction debris or debris from a demolished building. It might come out of a junked car or an old appliance.

Recycling that steel not only keeps it from going to a landfill, but also saves energy and natural resources. Every ton of steel that gets recycled reduces the need for 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,400 pounds of coal, and 120 pounds of limestone.

So what kinds of metal can go into curbside recycling bins? Obviously aluminum cans. Also other common household stuff, like clean aluminum foil, pie tins, tin cans, and jar lids (which should be put in separately from the jars).

If you have metal trash that can’t go in your curbside recycling bin—anything from an old screen door to a cast-iron skillet—there are other recycling resources. There are scrap-metal yards all over the country, places that will even give you a little cash based on the quantity of the metal you bring in. Even precious metals like gold and silver can be recycled. They can literally be melted down to make new jewelry or new coins or what have you.

RECYCLING GLASS

Glass is one of the easiest materials to recycle. Every single glass food and drink container you get can be recycled. It may not be as valuable as aluminum, but it’s still well worth the effort.

Again, you don’t even have to remove the labels before you recycle glass containers. Just rinse them out. The high-temperature processing will remove any contaminants.

The important point about glass is that some types cannot be mixed together. You can’t mix glass bottles with windows—car windows or building windows—or mirrors or glass dishes or drinking glasses or things like Pyrex kitchen bowls. You have to keep ceramic stuff separate, too, since it will contaminate glass. For the most part, that means you can put only glass bottles and jars in your curbside recycling bin.

What happens to the glass you send off for recycling? Odds are you will wind up buying it again. Most of the glass recycled in the United States gets used in new glass containers, though some of it is used to make fiberglass, too.

RECYCLING PLASTICS

         When it comes to plastic, Ed knows more than anybody. There are seven different kinds of plastic, designated by seven different recycling numbers. I marvel at Ed’s ability to retain all those numbers and what they mean.

All I know is they put a recycling symbol on the bottom of all plastic stuff.