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Recycling at home is simple and it can even be fun. It doesn’t matter if you live by yourself, with your partner, roommate/s, or with your family. Every household can become a little bit more sustainable through recycling. All it takes is some knowledge, awareness, and just a few simple modifications to your domestic waste management habits. Just follow our recycling guide.
So, if you are somebody who is:
Then this simple guide on how to recycle is a fantastic starting point to your journey towards a more sustainable future. We will get to how to start and what you can do but first, there are few things that you need to know so you can recycle responsibly.
Let’s take a look at a few actionable steps that can be applied to every household that wants to recycle.
When it comes to recycling at home, space is your best friend. If you have a spacious kitchen, a balcony, or a backyard, then you can easily place extra bins to do your separation.
If you have the extra space, then place dedicated containers for plastic, glass, paper, and cans. Make sure to rinse your bottles with water and follow the guidelines outlined in the previous sections. It will take a longer time for those dedicated containers to fill up. Once a container is full, dispose of the items responsibly in accordance with your local recycling program.
If you do not have enough space, then here is what you can do. Just add one extra container where you will put all the plastic, glass, and cans. As paper and cardboard can be bulky, maybe just have a dedicated drawer where you can place the flattened items or pick some secluded area in your home where you stack them. When your recycling container is full, take it to the nearest public recycling bins where you can do your separate disposal.
Moreover, if you have a garden or a backyard, you can also easily compost organic waste and use it to help your plants grow. If you live in an apartment, don’t get discouraged – there are various ways you can compost in a flat, too!
Consider the people you live with. Tell them that you would like to start recycling and ask them kindly for help and support. Explain to them the waste management system that you will establish and ask them kindly to follow it. It would be great if they are willing to recycle with you but don’t be surprised if you meet some resistance.
In case the other members of your household are not willing to recycle, don’t get angry at them. Change takes time. Instead, lead by example. Just tell them that you will be doing most of the work anyway and ask them not to throw away a garbage bag before you go through it. If you are willing to do that, of course.
Another useful thing that you can do is to place some recycling instructions on the door of your fridge. With time and work on your side, the other members of your household might be willing to change their ways, too.
Recycling is just one piece of the puzzle. Recycling is a good thing but it is even better if you shift your focus toward minimising waste in the first place. This means that you will have to make further changes to your lifestyle and shopping habits such as having dedicated shopping bags, opting for products that have easily managed packaging (or non at all), figuring out ways to reuse, resell or donate some of the things that you already own.
Minimising waste is something we greatly care about, here at Fantastic Services. “Clean, repair, maintain” is something that can be applied to many household items and furniture. Be it carpet cleaning, sofa cleaning, mattress cleaning, oven cleaning or home repairs, there are ways to keep using the things that we already have. This minimises waste and the rate at which we as a society contribute to landfills.
Make your home more sustainable with Fantastic Services!
All the details outlined in the previous sections might be a little too much to handle for some individuals who are just getting familiar with recycling at home. No worries, all you need to do is to introduce them to the BIG 3 rules of recycling as a starting point.
#1. Recycle CLEAN paper, cardboard, cans and bottles.
#2. Liquid and food stay out of your recycling.
#3. No plastic bags and soft plastics.
Do you know how they say that 80% of results come from 20% of the efforts? This is exactly what you will achieve by following these 3 simple rules of recycling. We are focusing on the 3 most important aspects and we are already doing most of the work. After a while, you or the members of your household can revisit the previous sections in order to level up your recycling game.
Oh and, don’t forget about the three R’s principle – reduce, reuse, and recycle.
Different types of plastic are marked with numbers (1-7) that show you the type of plastic a product is made of. It can give you an idea of how easily recyclable a product is and what its characteristics are. So here’s a list to help you figure out what is what.
Easiest to recycle/most commonly recycled plastics:
Somewhat recyclable plastics include:
Number 7 plastics are used for the creation of miscellaneous products. Plastics with the recycling labels 1 (avoid reusing), 2, and 4 are safe(r) choices, do not contain BPA and do not transmit any known chemicals into food. Avoid plastics with recycling labels 3 (believed to contain phthalates that interfere with hormonal development), 6 (believed to leach styrene, a possible human carcinogen, into food), and 7 (contains bisphenol A (BPA), which has been linked to heart disease and obesity).
There is a lot of misinformation circulating around the Internet about recycling. Let’s take a look at some claims (usually voiced by Internet trolls) and see if we can smite them with sound arguments and sheer common sense.
“Recycling is not worth it. All garbage goes to the same place.”
Are the governments all over the world really spending so much money to build recycling facilities and have millions of recycling bins placed in cities just so all the waste can go to the same place? We don’t think so.
“Recycling is not worth it. The efforts don’t make a difference.”
Again, this is simply not true. As we mentioned above, recycling materials actually requires less energy than manufacturing with raw materials and lessens CO2 emissions.
“Recycling is not worth it. Things can be recycled once so there is no point.”
Some things can not be recycled. Some things can be recycled a few times (like paper). But there are materials (like metal and glass) that can be recycled infinitely.
“Recycling is not worth it. Global warming is a myth.”
About 99% of scientists agree that global warming is real and it is a problem that should be addressed immediately.
Find out more about our Sustainability policy.
Image source: shutterstock / photographee.eu
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