While we take pride in being a reputable waste disposal and hauling company serving Southern Ontario, don’t think for a minute we’re not BIG fans of recycling too.
The vast majority of people all across Canada are fully onboard with the aim to minimize their waste disposal and recycle products as much as possible. It’s certainly the responsible thing to do in this day and age, and for a pair of very valid reasons. First of all, relieving the strain on municipal landfills and sorting depots to even the smallest extent is both good for the environment and minimizing the public expenditure required for them. Second, we’re all very fortunate with the way more and more items can be recycled and then reproduced as other products we all use.
Here are 5 items that you can direct to your recycling bin or authorized recycling depot that might come as a surprise, and the last one almost certainly will.
- Running Shoes– Footwear tends to see a lot of mileage, and every pair of running shoes will come to the end of their working life eventually. Rather than tossing them in the trash, see if there is any organization or service near you that takes them. A number of different ones accept used sneakers for recycling and reuse.
- Toilets and other Porcelain Fixtures– These are a staple in pretty much every landfill across the country, and they really don’t need to be. Further, they’re big, bulky, and often shattered into many pieces before they arrive there. Porcelain is an extremely hardy substance, and it will be there for many years. Instead, see if you can take yours to a fill yard. Why? Because these fixtures can be crushed and then used in sidewalk and road construction. Isn’t that great!
- CDs and CD-ROMs– This is a great one to recommend here, as the sheer volume of these and the way nearly everyone is discarding them with greater frequency these days is becoming a real issue. The discs are made of polycarbonate and aluminum, which complicates the recycling process. Make sure you take them to electronic-waste disposal facilities.
- Wine Corks– It’s interesting to note first that the majority of wine ‘corks’ these days aren’t really cork at all. Cork is in increasingly limited supply these days around the world, and most corks are now of composite material construction. Naturally – with the immense popularity of wine in North America – we’re churning out hundreds of thousands of them a month that primarily end up in landfills. Rather than tossing out your wine corks, recycle them at your local bottle return depot or elsewhere. They can be ground up and repurposed into components of other items, including cork flooring, cork wall tiles and bulletin boards, among others
- Cigarette Butts – Yep, here’s the surprising one. If you’re a smoker, you create one of these every time you have a smoke. It’s not hard to imagine just how many of these end up in landfills via your garbage bin after you empty an ashtray. It’s true – cigarette butts themselves are actually recyclable! The butts are then separated into their plastic, paper and tobacco parts. The latter two are composted, while the plastic component of the filter is melted into plastic pipettes that are then cut into pellets, which can be used in a vast number of production applications. Who would’ve thought it?
It’s important that we all do everything we can to recycle whenever possible, but of course there’s still much that should be disposed of in the standard way. When you’ve got a LOT of it and it’s beyond the means of you and your vehicle – give us a call!
