Recycle week: a beginner's guide

This week's eco-topic: Recycle

Never recycled before? Don't know where or how to recycle? Here's a crash course for total recycling newbies:

[Update: The info below's for the city of LA only. Beverly Hills, Culver City, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, and other surrounding cities have their own confusing rules and standards.]

1. Get recycling bins. If you own a home, this will be easy. But if you rent, chances are your apartment doesn't have a recycling system set up, because the city of L.A. started offering those things only last summer. Here's how to get blue bins for your apartment, free to you, from the city.

2. Know thy blue bin. The city of L.A. recycles much more than just bottles and cans; you can throw hangers, aluminum foil and all sorts of other stuff in there too. Find out all the stuff you can put in the blue bins.

3. Reduce before recycling. Yes, plastic bags and plastic foam (a.k.a. styrofoam) can now be recycled in the blue bins. However, both of those cost more to recycle than to produce -- especially as there's little to no market for the recycled products.

In fact, the prohibitive cost of trying to recycle plastic foam in particular has prevented other cities from attempting to recycle the stuff, opting instead to ban them altogether. San Francisco and Oakland have banned plastic bags from big grocery stores and pharmacies; Santa Monica is among nearly a dozen California cities that have banned plastic foam from city facilities or private vendors.

Besides, it's a drag trying to clean out foam cups for proper recycling. Just bring your own!

Photo by ClydeHouse via Flickr

Comments

[Wendy]

Great article on recycling!
Our apartment complex recycled just like you guys and then they allowed us to put it in a clear or lightly tinted blue bag. They gave us the option of a blue box or a recycle bag hanger. The bag hanger was a hit! They started with 2 floors of the apartment and then before long the people on the other floors wanted them. I don't know if the trail run was finish or not with the 2 floors but everone now has one now. The bag hanger has our trash haulers name on it Wikinson but in small writing it says Create-Some-Space recycling hanger? We still use the blue bins but we take our recycles to the big blue box on the main floor outside but in the garbage chute rooms on each floor they set them up. they used to have two blue boxes in the chute room and they'ed over flow and make a mess. The building maintence guy loves it. He takes the bags full down to the Big bin outside. It easier to walk through the building doors with a full bag of recyles I had many times boxes fall when wlking to the recycling room.
We also recycle the plastic grocery bags and the blue tinted bags we put our recyclables in.

Keep it up...L.A

Wendy
Toronto, Canada