Disposing of Household Toxics

Some tend to be very sloppy when it comes to handling toxic materials in the home. Individuals often handle toxic chemicals in ways businesses would be fined for. The heaviest application which to be honest is heavy of agricultural chemicals in the USA comes not from agribusiness, but rather from home gardeners. Indoor air pollution from household products is often found to exceed allowable federal outdoor quality rules.

Items such as poisons, paints, oil, solvents, automotive fluids, cleaners, herbicides and many others must not be dumped into the regular garbage. Water seeps through landfills and toxics end up in the water table. In areas that burn garbage, your toxics may end up in the air you breathe. The best thing to do is use what you buy, buy only what you need. If you have accumulated toxics, check with your Garbage Company or local recycling.

Think Outside the Bottle

In the 1970's nobody drank water out of single use bottles. Today single use bottles predominate: water delivered in plastic by trucks. Yet pipe delivered water faces much strong safety standards, and is far less environmentally intense. See Think Outside the Bottle and Bottled and Sold. What can you do? Purchase a stainless steel water bottle for your personal use. Encourage shops and business districts to make taps available for refilling personal bottles.

Coated Cardboard Food Canisters

Paper and foil mixtures, such as those used for prefabricated potato chips, are generally not valuable if placed in a recycling bin. There are exceptions in some areas. Similar foil/paper cartons from Tetra-Pak are recycled in limited areas.

Recycling Organic Matter (Compost)

It may seem strange to see the word compost on a recycling page, but compost is just recycled plant matter. Food and yard scraps placed in a special bin are converted into valuable garden soil in a matter of weeks. Compost bins are available at garden stores & nurseries. Composting can easily reduce by half the volume of material a household sends to a landfill. If you don't care about accelerating the processing, just keep adding material at the top. Just try to keep a balance of dry "brown" materials and fresh "green" material. For more technical information, try visiting the On-line Composting Center.

Lots of things you'd otherwise throw away can be composted, including wine bottle corks, cooking oils, certain types of foam packing peanuts, used paper towels, dryer lint, etc. If it is natural, you can probably compost it without trouble!

Waste from Computer Printers

Most printer cartridges are easily recycled, refilled or re-built. But printer vendors sell the printer cheap, and make their real money selling supplies. They don't want you be environmental. The "right" environmental solution is to sell new cartridges with a postage paid mailer for returning the old one. Some forward-thinking companies, such as Hewlett-Packard, have been known to do this, especially for laser printers (A). Sometimes you can find free envelopes for donating cartridges to a re-filler, but don't bother with refill kits. They may save money, but they are messy, and you use as much plastic as a new cartridge.

To make a difference, buy recycled paper for your printer (because of the fine grain, it can look better than regular sliced trees). Grab piles of "blank on one side" paper from work, and use the other side. And always buy recycled. See The Yahoo! Recycled Printer Supplies Listing. Encourage your company to buy a printer with duplexing (two sided printing), and to hire a company to take away waste paper regularly. WARNING: You may have a recycle bin at your company. Stay a little late one night and ask the cleaning people where it goes. You may be in for a shock.

Recycling Motor Oil, Tires and Car Batteries

All three of these products are big environmental problems, but all three are easily recycled. Used motor oil contains heavy metals and other toxic substances, and is considered hazardous waste. Each year do-it-yourself oil changers improperly dump more oil than the tanker Exxon Valdez spilled into Alaska's Prince William Sound. One quart of oil can kill fish in thousands of gallons of water. Motor oil containers should mention the danger of used oil to humans and the environment (C).-=NOTE!=-Motor oil must never be dumped in storm drains; storm drains flow *untreated* into rivers, lakes or oceans. Your quart of oil *does* make a difference - don't dump it. Recycling used motor oil is easy. Typically you used oil into a plastic milk jug and clearly mark it "used motor oil". The following should help you find a location to take the oil. Please drop off oil during regular business hours only: Call your local garbage, recycling or toxics agency for a referral. In California - Call 1-800-CLEAN-UP for locations.

Many quick-lube shops take oil (the industry association encourages it):Jiffy Lube - (Contact any Jiffy Lube Station nationwide).Valvoline Instant Oil Change Centers - (Contact any Valvoline Station)(Valvoline's First Recovery Service, however, was sold to Safety Klean).Many auto stores take oil, including Grand Auto, R&S Strauss, Pep-Boys and Wal-Mart. Some states have laws requiring any business that sells oil to take used oil back from consumers. Antifreeze contaminates motor oil - do not mix the two. If your car has blown a gasket and you are draining the oil, mark it clearly as potentially contaminated and treat it as non-recyclable household waste (see below). Never mix anything with used motor oil. Never place used oil in a container that has contained other chemicals. Used oil filters are sometimes accepted by the same recyclers who accept oil. Antifreeze and brake fluid may also be accepted. You normally must pay a fee to dispose of a tire (usually $1-$5), but it is worth it. Improperly disposed tires tend to rise to the top of landfills, breed mosquitoes, transit disease when traded globally, and burn when stacked in large piles. Old car batteries are the most widely recycled material in the US with a 96% rate of recycling, according to the EPA. Any retailer who sells batteries is required to accept old batteries for recycling, and in fact is likely to pay you for your battery. In California, certified used oil collection sites pay 40c per gallon.

Newspapers

Newspaper is widely available and of uniform consistency, which makes it valuable. The entire newspapers including inserts acceptable, except for things like plastic, product samples and rubber bands. Newspapers may be stuffed in large brown grocery sacks, or tied with natural-fiber twine. Other brown paper bags may be mixed with newspaper.

Recycling Paper

Most types of paper can be recycled. Newspapers have been recycled profitably for decades, and recycling of other paper is growing. Virgin paper pulp prices have soared in recent years prompting construction of more plants capable of using waste paper. They key to recycling is collecting large quantities of clean, well-sorted, uncontaminated and dry paper.

It is important to know what you are buying in a paper product, for that reason virtually all paper products should be marked with the percentage and type of recycled content, as above (C). Just saying "recycled paper" is not enough. "Recycled paper" could mean anything from 100% true recycled paper to 1% re-manufactured ends of large paper rolls. "Post-consumer" means the paper that you and I return to recycling centers. From a recycling point of view, the more "post-consumer" paper the better. Soybean-based inks are gaining favor as a renewable alternative to harsh and toxic petrochemical inks.

Recycling Single Use Batteries (Alkaline, Heavy Duty)

Once recommended for the trash, increasingly these batteries are collected. Not that they are actually recycled: often they are simply put in a more expensive landfill. The State of California mandates recycling of such batteries.

With the invention of "low self-discharge" or "pre-charged" NiMH batteries, single use batteries are all but obsolete. A leading "low discharge" brand is the Sanyo Eneloop, costing less than 3 times that of a typical single use battery. Investing in a "smart" charger is a must for the best battery life. Shop for models with microprocessor control (not a timer), and the ability to charge each battery individually (not two or four at a time).

Recycling Old Refrigerators, Air Conditioners, and Heat Pumps

Older refrigeration equipment contains freon, a chemical know as a Chlorinated Fluorocarbon or "CFC" for short. Each molecule of a CFC can destroy over 100,000 molecules of the earth's protective ozone coating, leading to increased risk of sunburn, cataracts and skin cancer for the entire population of the planet (human AND animal). Equipment manufactured before 2010 uses a type called R-22, which is the most damaging type for the atmosphere. Newer units use R-410A, which is significantly less bad for the environment.

Production of R-22 refrigerant is scheduled to be completely phased out by the year 2020. The only R-22 available will be R-22 recycled from appliances being thrown out. This means your R-22 may become more valuable than the cost removal, and in fact there are some programs around the country where recycling of R-22 appliances is free or even earn a small payout. Check with your local electric company or recycling authority.

If you are not using such a program and throwing away an old refrigerator, heat pump or air conditioner please be sure the CFC's are drained out and recycled first. Use only a hauler who will perform this important service -- call and ask before you let them take your old equipment away. Before having your car's air conditioner serviced, ask what the shop does with the Freon. Never allow a leaking refrigeration system to be recharged.

A number of international treaties, federal and state laws govern the use of CFC's. Handlers of refrigeration equipment can get information on laws and recycling equipment from AHRI.

Recycling Rechargeable Batteries (other than car batteries)

Rechargeable batteries are commonly used in portable telephones, computers, power tools, shavers, electric toothbrushes, radios, video tape recorders and other consumer products. There are a variety of different battery types, some of which contain quite toxic materials.

The Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation (Call to Recycle) is an industry funded group promoting battery recycling. Manufacturers pay a fee to use the logo shown to the right, and to support the costs of the eventual collection of the batteries they sell.

Nickel Cadmium (Ni-Cd), Nickel Metal Hydride (Ni-MH), Lithium Ion (Li-ion), and Small Sealed Lead (Pb) batteries can all be recycled. Several states now prohibit consumers from dumping rechargeable batteries into the normal trash. Nickel-Cadmium rechargeable batteries ("NiCads") contain cadmium, a metal that causes blood and reproductive damage, among other problems. Most of the Cadmium in our waste stream comes from batteries. These batteries pose little hazard in use (the Cadmium is in a stable form), but are a danger in landfills.

Worn-out batteries are often easily replaced. While many batteries are custom shapes (just you so have to buy a special battery) the chemistry inside is identical. A clever repairperson can replace just about any rechargeable battery.

White Office Paper

One of the highest grades of paper is white office paper. Acceptable are clean white sheets from the likes of laser printers and copy machines. Colored, contaminated, or lower grade paper is not acceptable. The wrappers the paper comes in are of lower grade, and not acceptable. Staples are OK. White office paper may be downgraded, and recycled with mixed paper.

Recycling Glass, Steel, and Aluminum Cans and Foil

Glass, steel (or "tin") and aluminum are easy to recognize and recycle. For clarity, a recycling symbol should be present, but most people have little trouble sorting these materials. Glass bottles must not be mixed with other types of glass such as windows, light bulbs, mirrors, glass tableware, Pyrex or auto glass. Ceramics contaminate glass and are difficult to sort out. Clear glass is the most valuable. Mixed color glass is near worthless, and broken glass is hard to sort.

There have been marketing experiments with plastic and steel cans that look exactly like aluminum cans. Recycling plants have been damaged by these fakes. The distinctive shape of an aluminum beverage must be reserved for aluminum beverage cans only (C).

It is no longer necessary to remove labels for recycling. To save water, clean only enough to prevent odors, unlike with plastics, the high temperature of glass and metal processing deals easily with contamination.

Scrap aluminum is accepted in many places. Other metals are rarely accepted.

Recycling Plastic

Plastic has long been a problem when it comes to recycling. But with huge volumes of the material in use, solutions are starting to emerge. Check in your community for local runs. Clear plastic soda containers, or most containers with a narrow neck, are widely accepted. Plastic bags can usually be dropped off at supermarkets. And some places now offer to collect any scrap plastic (including broken toys or other objects).Plastics have to be sorted by type for recycling, which was the idea behind those numbers inside the chasing arrows. The numbers did not mean the plastic could be recycled: it only indicates the type of plastic. These days the sorting is increasingly done after the material is chopped up. The plastic types were defined by the Society of the Plastics Industry: (1) PETE Polyethylene Terephthalate (PET) Soda & water containers, some waterproof packaging. (2) HDPE High-Density Polyethylene Milk, detergent & oil bottles. Toys and plastic bags, (3) Vinyl/Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) Food wrappers, vegetable oil bottles, blister packages.* Type 4 - LDPE Low-Density Polyethylene Many plastic bags. Shrink wrap, garment bags. * Type 5 - PP Polypropylene. Refrigerated containers, some bags, most bottle tops,some carpets, some food wrap.* Type 6 - PS Polystyrene Throwaway utensils, meat packing, protective packing.* Type 7 - OTHER Usually layered or mixed plastic. No recycling potential - must be landfilled.

Corrugated Cardboard

In areas that don't take cardboard from consumers, one can often drop boxes off at a supermarket or other high volume business. Contaminated cardboard, like greasy pizza boxes, is not acceptable. In some areas cardboard must be free of tape, but staples are always OK.

Phone books

Some phone books are made with special glue that breaks down in water, while other phone books use glue that interferes with recycling. Printed in your phone book should be information on the source and type of paper used, the nature of the binding, and where locally phone books can be recycled (C). Note that many phone companies continue to use virgin rain forest to produce directories. In many communities phone books are only accepted during the time new directories are distributed.

Textiles

Many charitable and nonprofit organizations operate drop-off points for textiles like clothes and shoes. You usually find these sites in supermarket parking lots and in the organizations' own business locations. What the groups can't reuse they generally sell to private firms that deal in textiles.

Composting Grass clippings, leaves and small tree trimmings. The University Facilities Grounds Maintenance Department oversees the turning of the material into serviceable compost that can be used to support top soil and plant beds.

Cooking Oils

100% of cooking waste oil is collected to be converted into bio-fuel. Cooking waste oil is recycled from all of Campus Dinings locations: Northside Market (34th and Race Streets), Ross Commons (34th Street and Powelton Avenue), Handschumacher Dining Center (32nd and Chestnut Streets) and the Queen Lane Campus (2900 Queen Lane).

Electronics

Electronics that are obsolete, broken, and destined for recycling or disposal are sometimes called "e waste." There are many chemical and mineral elements in e waste. A circuit board contains copper, gold, silver, platinum and palladium, as well as lead. If recycled properly, this waste is a valuable source of secondary raw materials.

Santisima Cruz, Elementary SchoolBrgy Santisama Cruz, Santa Cruz, Laguna

Recycled Products/Foods(Term Paper)

Submitted by:Chelmir Gallinera Manansala

Grade & Section:V-Capricorn