Recycling at Home- How hard is it?

Bad habits are hard to break. Simply chucking all your garbage into one big bag and putting it out for the municipal collection is nothing more than a bad habit. But with a little bit of organisation, and very little cost, you can easily set up your home or office to start recycling.

To start with, lets look at what you can recycle (care of Clearer Conscience):

PRODUCT	CODE	EXAMPLE	NO GOOD
PLASTIC	1 PET	Bottles (e.g. soft drinks)	Any plastic labeled 3 or 7
Look for number or abbreviation by recycle logo	2 PE-HD	Household (e.g. detergents, shampoo)	Cling wrap, florist wrap
	4 PE-LD	Film (e.g. frozen veg, appliances)
	5 PP	Containers (ice cream, marg, feta, food trays)
	6	Polystyrene/Styrofoam
		Tetrapaks (long life milk cartons)
GLASS		Jars, bottles	Heavy glass, e.g. windscreens, window panes
PAPER		Newspapers, junk mail, office paper, exercise books, etc Magazines & books: please keep separate so these can be sold through charity shops	Phone directories
CARDBOARD		Boxes, toilet rolls, cereal boxes, etc	Wax lined boxes (juice, fruit, etc)
METAL		Tins, cans
OTHER - BY PRIOR ARRANGEMENT		Clothes, bric-a-brac (must be in good condition so can be donated to charity shops) Broken tiles & crockery Plants, garden accessories Computer cartridges
N.B.		Please rinse food containers. No need to rinse bottles.	No disposable nappies; no foodstuffs

In addition to the above, Urban Sprout, recently reported that now even tetra pak can be recycled in Cape Town.

Now that you know what to set aside/ separate for recycling, all you need is a couple of containers to put it in and then have it collected (or drop it off yourself). To separate the recycling, in our home we've dedicated one small cupboard and put five reasonably sized containers (a mix of simple conventional bins and/or big tupperwares) - paper; plastic; tins; glass and general un-recyclabe rubbish (we also have a another tupaware for fresh produce to go to our worm farm). It take up little space and is just as convienient as throwing away rubbish the old (bad habbit) way - no mess, no fuss.

In our storeroom, we have seperate bins (boxes) for each of the items and twice a week we take from the kitchen cupboard and into the store room - the same as you would remove your rubbish the old (bad habbit) way - no difference here.

Instead of putting our two or three bags for municple collection every week, we put out one small one. And finally, once a month, we put out our four bags for recycling collection. Its that simple, and costs very little more (approximately R80 per month for Clearer Consience to collect), but makes a huge differnce...

The City of Cape Town says waste-to-landfill amounts increase by 7% annually even though the net population increase is only 2% over the same period. They're running out of landfill space! And asside from the space issue, is the well documented need to stop deforestation, and reduce global consuption (industy generating CO2's etc).

Recycling is one of the easiest ways to contribute to the fight against global warming and the global culture of waste. DO IT TODAY!

Google "Recycling+your town or city", or look at Urban Sprout's recycling directory for more info.