7 doable ways to start recycling today

Recycling helps reduce carbon emissions, conserve wildlife, curtail deforestation, allows creative ways to convert waste into usable products, saves money, conserves energy and natural resources—but most importantly allows an individual to make a significant impact on the environment. Here’s how you can get started today:

1. Carry your own bag to the grocery store

Always carry a cloth bag to a grocery store. If you usually pick up groceries on your way back from work, fold the cloth bag into one pocket of your office bag. Getting rid of the plastic bags once you get home after shopping is always an additional chore. You have to allocate space in your kitchen closet just to keep plastics, especially if you get a fresh stock after every round of shopping.

Moreover, plastic bags are also not as strong as cloth bags. When heavy they easily tear or they dig into your fingers, making the walk back home from the grocery store an unpleasant affair for your hands. Cloth bags can look trendy and can be as big or small as you want them to be. If you want to spread your love for recycling, you can pick a bag that flashes a catchy message.

2. Carry a water bottle that you can easily refill

Buying drinking water seems like a waste of resources when you can easily carry a water bottle wherever you go. Your office, fitness centers, and restaurants—all have drinking water. If you have trouble locating a water fountain closest to you, free apps like OasisPlaces can help. You are also more likely to drink water if you have a water bottle in your bag all the time. If drinking water means walking down to the closest shop to purchase bottled water, you are less likely to make that effort all the time.

Carrying water can also help you measure how much water you realistically consume in a day. According to nutritionists, drinking eight to 10 glasses of water are essential for a healthy body. If drinking water gets boring, you can always carry iced green tea, slice chunks of watermelon or mint leaves in your water bottle, or carry lemonade for a change. Remember, in carrying a water bottle, you are doing your bit to contribute less plastic waste to the environment.

3. Recycle your garbage at home

If your building has a recycling policy that is strictly enforced, chances are you will have to recycle your garbage at home, even if it seems like a lot of work. If you don’t have a recycling policy, do it none-the-less. Look online to see if your city has recycling centers where you need to drop things off, or your city may have assigned a day and place where it picks up trash in your neighborhood.

The easiest way to recycle is to divide your garbage into four categories—paper, plastics, glass, and kitchen waste. Paper includes cardboard boxes, egg cartons, magazines, and newspapers. Plastics include the spoons and forks many restaurants provide with takeout, sachets that contain dressing or sauce, and transparent rolls used to wrap groceries. Sometimes glass and metal items are stashed together and sometimes they are not. Find out what’s the policy in your apartment building. Kitchen waste includes banana peals, food that may have gone bad, eggshells, and mostly everything biodegradable. The good thing about recycling is that once you get into the habit, it’ll be second nature, and therefore no effort at all.

4. Re-use envelopes by turning them inside out

You can re-use envelopes if you use a paper cutter to open the seams of an old envelope and turn it inside out. This simple trick with envelopes can be applied to plenty other household items. You can use both sides of printing paper, especially while printing tickets or while printing documents that you alone need to read. You can make it a habit to save gift-wrap so that you can re-use it for someone’s birthday. You can save birthday cards too, by artistically covering up the part with a message written for you.

Other places where you can cut out on waste is by not buying paper towels at home and simply using cloth to clean tables and kitchen counters. The cloth can be easily cleaned every time it gets dirty. The money you spend buying paper towels each week can be easily spent buying a set of good quality, absorbable cloth for cleaning purposes. Even cleaning supplies such as detergents and powders can be purchased bottle-free. You can also buy grocery such as sugar, salt, coffee, nuts, and meats without their plastic packaging in some organic stores.

5. Always buy rechargeable batteries

Shopping with a recycling mindset means buying things that can be easily used again. This usually involves being a lot more patient while making your shopping rounds. Remind yourself that by purchasing an article that can have multiple uses than buying the same thing over again, you are saving yourself time and money in the long run.

A good example is purchasing a rechargeable battery, which is a kind of storage battery or secondary cell that can be charged multiple times. One-time use batteries like the name suggests, have to be thrown away after use cause they produce current through a chemical reaction that consumes their reactive anode. The anode gets used up in case of rechargeable batteries as well, but at a much slower rate.

6. Know what to do with e-waste

According to DoSomething.org, discarded TV sets, fax machines, computers, laptops, printers, and cell phones produced 2.37 million short tons of e-waste in 2009. Even though e-waste in the U.S. contributes only 2 percent of trash in landfills, it makes up 70 percent of toxic waste. One way to reduce e-waste is by being conscious of the electronic products you purchase. Sometimes when a paper shredder gets choked or a toaster starts acting up, we lose patience and dump the machine. It’s a lot easier to search the Internet for easy fixes and have your machine working again.

Sometimes we buy electronics just because they are cheap or we lack impulse control when we go shopping. We don’t need an iphone upgrade as soon as something new in the market becomes available. Also, while getting rid of old electronics, we need to know that throwing them in the trash, will add to environmental problems. Find out where you can drop them off so that they can be easily recycled. Many Best Buy stores and Staples stores offer recycling facilities. There are also Non-governmental Organizations, which can refurbish old laptops and send them over to less-privileged children for free.

7. Donate your clothes so they can be re-used

Donating your old clothes to a charity or thrift store means someone else can use that piece of clothing, whether it’s a child from a low income household or a homeless woman out in the streets. Mostly, as soon as you give a piece of clothing away, it will first be sold if its still in wearable condition. If not, the clothes will be donated for use by charities or given to clothing recyclers that will shred the cloth to scraps and re-make them into carpets, cleaning rags, cloth bags, or new clothes.

The important lesson to remember is that throwing old clothes into the trash does not allow them to be easily recycled. Apps like Kidizen are free for use and allow parents to buy and sell used children’s clothing, which quite often are used for a very short while, since kids easily outgrow them. APKPure is another app that can give you creative ideas on how to convert old shirts into shopping bags and old dresses into trendy skirts. Charities have multiple pick up points across cities for donating old clothes, and some such as Out of the Closet thrift stores provide services like picking up discarded clothing from your doorstep. All you need to do is some online research to get all the answers you need when it comes to recycling anything at all.