Posted by Snow in 
Recycling ideas become productive when experimental re-uses and recycling activities become habits. When these habits become normal instincts which educate others, the eco-friendly practices yield real benefit.
Identifying wasteful habits in everyday consumer patterns should be a foremost concern. Then, when everyday habits shift into sustainable living standards, an entire lifecycle engenders positive environmental change.
But sometimes people know their particular consumer habits don’t have any recycling change potential. They don’t see any opportunity in the way they live to incite change. They may shrug at consumer packaging waste reports and complacently look on as eco-activists ramble on. If you know someone who fits this bill, email them the following list of recycling Odds & Ends. Challenge someone to live green in just one tiny way, for a month, a week, or a single day.
1. Starbucks Cup Re-Use
Starbucks has a ten cents off cup re-use policy. Bring your own cup for that cup of Joe and realize serious packaging decrease. If a Starbuck’s branch has 400 customers a day, and only ten per cent of those bring re-usable cups, then that’s 40 paper cups and corrugated liners a day saved. Think about how many actual locations Starbuck’s has, and you begin to see how re-use policies can make a difference. When the work gang heads out for that “off-campus” meeting, encourage everyone to re-use their cup or save the one they bring back.
2. Use Newspapers as Compost/Mulch
Mulch is an old-school term for physical retardant of weed grown in garden and flower beds. Protecting plants from moisture evaporation, weed upshoots, and critters digging up plant or vegetable bulbs has been a classic problem for conventional fruit and vegetable gardeners.Layers of newspaper (with biodegradeable ink) guard against bird beaks plugging for worms ruining an organized seed bed or tomato yield because sunlight and high temperatures burned off too much moisture.Shredded strips of newspaper or chopped bits form a nice potting soil structure that supports young plants below the topsoil layer.
3.Shop/Dine Locally
Every family or couple has their date-night dining and weekend shopping favorites. But shopping locally encourages local growers and makes more sense. Try finding a more locavore dining option than that all-you-can-eat chain 25 minutes away. Create a new radius around your home and investigate new eat-out options a short distance away. Don’t be afraid of asking waiters or waitresses for “slow food” alternatives to centrally packaged meals regionally prepared and shipped to restaurant locations. Your favorites entrees may come out of a foil package, cooked months before thousands of miles away and shipped overland to kitchen freezers.
4. Troll for Recyclables
Get the whole family out for a walk or just go in intergenerational pairs to the mall, to the park, anywhere excessive amounts of trash collect. Bring a plastic bag and wear plastic gloves and sort through random trash bins. Even scanning the top layer of various trash receptacles, after a busy weekend there is plenty of aluminum cans and appropriately symboled plastic to get to the recycling bin.
Make it profitable and mobilize to a local recycling center. If everybody grabs five cans or bottles (and the rinsewater is transitioned to gray water in the back yard) That could be worth ninety-nine cents off anything in the store. Saving a dollar a day at the grocery store can add up.
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