Can I Recycle This? 5 Things You Should Always Recycle (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)

If you’re anything like us, you’re constantly trying to figure out, Can I recycle this or not? We wish the rules were simple and consistent, but what you can recycle (takeout containers? shipping boxes? junk mail?) and where (curbside? recycling center?) largely depends on what your local municipality can — or will — handle.

The good news is that with a little effort, you can achieve zero waste. If you can’t leave a particular item curbside or in your apartment building’s recycling bins, for example, you can probably take it to a recycling center or donate it to a specialized recycling company like TerraCycle, an international firm that collects hard-to-recycle items and repurposes them into resalable products.
In 2012 alone, Americans recycled and composted 87 million tons of municipal solid waste, eliminating more than 168 million metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, and saving 1.1 quadrillion British thermal units of energy — enough to power about 10 million households in the United States for a year. Decent numbers, but given that U.S. households create more than 251 million tons of trash a year, half of which ends up in landfills, we still have a long way to go. So, we asked Albe Zakes, global vice president of communications at TerraCycle, to help us get there. Here’s his simple guide of recycling do’s and don’ts. We hope you’ll pick up some key pointers. We sure did.
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5 Items You Can’t Recycle

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5 Items You Should Always Recycle

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These 10 tips are just a starting point. The ultimate goal is to rethink your lifestyle and reduce the amount of waste you produce to begin with. As the mantra goes: Reduce, reuse and recycle. “They’re in that order for a reason,” Zakes says. If you can’t reduce your consumption, reuse what you can; if you can’t reuse it, then recycle — even if it takes additional effort. “In reality, almost everything can be recycled,” Zakes says. “The only reason that something is considered ‘nonrecyclable’ is the economics behind it. So the cost of collecting and processing the material is too high versus the revenue that the end material creates.”
Correction: A previous version of this article stated that all aerosol cans cannot be recycled. NationSwell apologies for the error.
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What Does It Take to Be a Zero-Waste Manufacturer? This Company Is Finding Out

Waste-free manufacturing might sound like an oxymoron. But for Tom’s of Maine, the maker of eco-friendly toiletry products, going waste-free is a lofty goal  that may soon be within reach. In the company’s annual “Goodness Report” released in summer 2013, Tom’s pledged to reduce the amount of waste the company sends to landfills from 83 kilograms of waste per ton of goods produced (the company’s already low 2012 baseline) to zero kilograms per ton by 2020. To do this, the company is attacking the issue from all angles, expanding its recycling efforts, and thinking of creative ways that consumers can dispose of its packaging. “Unlike a lot of other financial decisions that are made in a business, the financial decisions we make around reducing waste are decisions based on our core values,” CEO Tom O’Brien told Earth911. “One of our core values is environmental responsibility, and to be environmentally responsible you better be focused on reducing waste.”
Tom’s already reuses cardboard boxes and scraps from plastic deodorant containers, but in an effort to reach its 2020 goal, the company has partnered with Terracycle to reclaim other streams of waste. For example, it can now recycle the shrink-wrap that’s used to protect pallets of packaging from contamination. The company has also made their packaging completely recyclable, a bonus for consumers, and is tracking the initiative’s progress online. Imagine what a difference it would make if other companies followed Tom’s lead.
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