Do you have suggestions on recycling activities that a community can undertake?
April 9th, 2010
I am planning to start a recycling campaign, a sustainable one, in our community. Please do give me suggestions on simple yet realistic recycling activities. Your suggestions will surely help. Merci beaucoup!
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First of all – GOOD FOR YOU!!! Count me in if you are anywhere near Fishers! I don’t know what scale you are thinking of, but here are some ideas from home level to city wide!
Composting is my favorite recycling project, I’m an avid gardener! – educating people on the benefits of compost, and the simplicity of making it is the ultimate recycling project! You can see the results, and it keeps so much out of landfills.
- saving grass clippings, letting them rot down and spreading them on flower beds etc. Even better – mow with a mulching mower! Garden waste can be saved in anything from a simple pile to a fancy compost bin.
-collecting leaves in fall; on a home level, mow over them and bag them. Spreading the chipped leaves over flower beds creates great mulch, protects your plants, and puts essential nutrients back into the soil. On a community scale, you’d need a large place to compost them, but compost is excellent plant food, and you can sell it cheap to cover costs! (or free if you don’t have costs)
- you can collect tree limbs, trimmings etc and chip them for mulch. Sell bags of mulch back to the community!
- set up a central recycling point. Lots of skips for different recyclables, you can actually cover your own costs in a lot of ways here, aluminum and other metals, and paper/magazines can be sold to recyclers. Include building materials if you really want to get large scale!
- have recycling bins next to regular trash bins around town for cans, plastic and glass bottles. In Germany, their regular trash cans are divided into 4 sections for glass, plastic, metal and trash! It is so cool. This would obviously need town approval, but getting them involved would be awesome!
There are so many ways to approach this, but the most important thing, I think, is to educate the public! In general, most Americans don’t think in terms of recycling, or the environment. Just getting the public to change their thinking is the biggest step to success – and making things easy for them will help too!
I hope this helps! Good Luck.