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

And it does not outgas toxic fumes. Additionally, the material is photodegradable and recyclable, so many generations of products can be made from the same amount of original material.

EcoFoam can take a variety of forms, from a soft foam to a more dense, rubberlike foam, as well as a material that can replace vinyl, making it nearly as versatile as PVC. Also, ecoFoam’s lightweight, closed-cell construction makes it resistant to moisture absorption, and it can be formulated to dampen sound and vibration. It also can be combined with other materials to increase strength—even laminated onto fabrics. And in most cases, ecoFoam can replace PVC with little to no effect on manufacturing processes, which makes it a logical next step in removing PVC from our daily lives.

—Josh Bradley

So that’s PVC, which is no. 3 plastic. And then there’s no. 6 plastic, better known as Styrofoam. I certainly do not buy Styrofoam in any form. But whether you buy it or not, you’re going to get some Styrofoam. If someone sends me something with Styrofoam packing material in the box, I am never going to throw it away. I’ll reuse it as a packing material or take it to a recycling program.

The plastic industry claims—and I take them at their word—that they want people to recycle Styrofoam, and so they take these things back in cities across the nation. It should be easy to do a Google search and find a place in your area that accepts Styrofoam. So before I could throw it in the blue bin, I would save no. 6 plastic. Rachelle and I even have friends who would bring their Styrofoam to our house. And then I took it to a place in the City of Commerce called Free Flow Packaging two or three times a year.

And there’s other stuff that supposedly cannot be recycled, like plastic bags. You can’t put them in most cities’ recycling bin. But there are dry cleaners and markets that will take plastic bags back. You just have to do a little research and a little legwork.

RECYCLING PAPER

There’re all kinds of paper: white office paper, notebook paper, paper napkins, paper towels, milk cartons, newspapers, magazines, catalogs, paper shopping bags, junk mail, toilet paper rolls, telephone books, corrugated card-board boxes used for shipping, chipped cardboard boxes such as cereal boxes. And most of that paper can be recycled. Most of it is also accepted by cities’ curbside recycling programs.

But while I could put pretty much all my waste paper into the blue curb-side recycling bin in L.A., for extra credit, I save certain kinds of paper—my white office paper and my colored paper—and I shred it up and use it as packing material when I ship my cleaning products, Begley’s Best. And if I’ve shredded all I can use, I take the rest of that paper to Alpha Recycling in North Hollywood. There, I can put it in the white and colored-paper bins.

I use shredded waste paper as packing material.

Why go the extra step? Because the mixed paper that’s going in the blue curbside recycling bin will be used mostly for backing material for roofing tiles. It’s a very low grade. Think about it: It gets mixed in with old tuna fish cans, and most people don’t rinse things out really well. What kind of paper is it after it’s been mixed in with everything else? It’s a crappy paper, so it doesn’t get a high use.

My good white paper and colored paper that’s clean and dry is a higher-quality recyclable. It can even, conceivably, be made into paper again, or into file folders or something like that.

What about recycling newspapers? Newspapers are absolutely recyclable—every part of them, even the glossy inserts—and you can mix brown paper grocery bags in with newspaper, too.

We’ve been recycling newspaper in this country for decades—for a profit. When newspaper gets recycled, it often gets made into newsprint again, or it gets made into corrugated boxes or folding boxes.

Magazines can also be recycled in curbside bins. Of course, you can find other ways to recycle magazines, too. You can donate them to a library or a veterans hospital or a doctor’s office. You can even use the pages as gift wrap or let your kids use them for arts and crafts projects. The same goes for catalogs.

Phone books are another easy-to-recycle item. Just put them in your curbside bin, along with most of your junk mail (you just need to pull out any stuff like magnets or product samples first).

You can put corrugated cardboard into curbside recycling bins, too. And if you’re recycling boxes or office paper, you don’t have to worry about removing staples. They’ll get taken care of during the recycling process. But you do need to remove packing tape.

The one exception, with regard to recycling cardboard, is dirty card-board. Things like greasy pizza boxes can’t be recycled. They’re just going to contaminate the other stuff you and your neighbors put in your recycling bins, so they have to go in the trash.

Other paper that cannot be recycled includes wax paper, paper that’s been contaminated with food, carbon paper, thermal fax paper, paper with a sticky backing (like stickers and Post-its), and paper that’s been laminated.

Because they have a waxy coating, milk cartons and juice boxes cannot be recycled. Well, technically, they can be recycled, but the process is so difficult and so expensive that very few companies are recycling that stuff right now. A few cities’ curbside recycling programs will take milk cartons, like the program in Boston. But this stuff mainly does not get recycled right now. So when I go to buy milk or juice at the store, I choose to buy it packaged in a glass container—or if I can’t, then I’ll buy it in a recyclable plastic container.

Hazardous Waste

Hazardous waste comes in so many forms. Hazardous waste is AAA batteries, 12-volt batteries,