Recycling Makes All of Us Feel We Are Environmentally Responsible But How Many of Us Do it Right?

September 5, 2018

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September 5, 2018 – How many of us with the best intentions throw into our recycling bin non-recyclable materials, or put in the bin undeconstructed materials impossible to recycle? In the apartment where I live in Toronto, we have a recycling and composting program. Kitchen scraps go into the compost bin at the back of the building. Recycling is placed in large blue bins that on any given week are packed with a mix of plastics, metal, cardboard, paper and many things not on the list of approved recyclables. For example, in Toronto, black plastic, even if marked as recyclable, is not accepted yet I see lots of it in the bins when I bring down my recyclables. Cardboard from those Amazon Prime and other online shopping vendors packages that arrive at the apartment are often tossed whole into the recycling bins. This presents additional challenges for the collectors of recyclables. And then there are the people who put recyclables into plastic garbage bags, another Toronto no-no. That’s because the city requires all recyclables to be loose.

And of course, there are people who don’t recycle for whatever reason. Maybe they feel it is too much of a hassle sorting out landfill garbage from recyclable items. Or maybe their cities don’t have recyclable programs in place. For whatever reason, the impact on garbage and landfill by not recycling reusable materials is an unsustainable practice.

The infographic below was sent to me by Jessica Pyykkonen who worked with Quill.com, a U.S.-based online shopping site focused on supplying small and medium-sized businesses with a wide variety of products, to create this handy guide to the ins and outs of recycling. She notes that if 75% of us were to recycle the environmental impact would be equivalent to removing 55 million cars from our roads. She further states, “Even that can that you might have casually thrown away has a direct translation into environmental benefit. Recycling it and keeping it out of the waste stream translates into energy to power your television for three hours—that’s a lot of Netflix that you can watch.”