Monday, February 11, 2008

Recyling bins: Aid to encourage recycling

Recycling habits are hard to instill in people used to the old, wasteful, couldn’t care less attitudes. In some countries, effective recycling programs have to be enforced via regulations. In other countries, making it easy for people to recycle would be a big help, and one of the ways would be to place as many recycling bins as possible in as many convenient locations as possible. This has been done in my country where such recycling bins have been placed at strategic places like residence association’s centers, schools, shopping centers, etc.

Recycling bins can be made of various types of materials. The preferable ones are recycle container that are themselves made from recycled materials such as recycled plastic. One has to be seen as practicing what one preaches. Other than recycled plastic, there are bins for recycling which are made from recycled milk jugs.

It is not enough to just place a single recycling bin at a location as then people will stuff it with paper, glass, aluminum, plastic, etc., into a single bin. This will mean you need to have people to sort them out and divide them into different stream for the recycling process. There should be more than one bin. One for paper, one for plastic, one for glass, etc. This will make for much easier, less labor intensive and more cost effective recycling.

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2 comments:

Mark said...

It's good to see that there are sites out there encourgaing recycling. I'm trying to do the same, but I am having a hard time getting up to speed. We have a bin from our local gov. They've been doing it for quite some time, and have only the one bin. I think ease of use is more important to get people to really use recycling.

Here's my blog- If you have comments- I have a few questions I've posed. cheers - http://auartworkofmark.blogspot.com/

Enviroman said...

Hi Mark,

Wonder which country you are from. Mine is not yet a developed country and is not exactly very strong on environmental protection and conservation. But in recycling centers, we have different bins for paper, glass, etc.

BTW your blog URL is not active and require one to copy-paste into the browser bar to get to your blog which is not good practice, and I think it is good to look at this post - Make active (clickable) links in posts and comments.

Peter Blog*Star
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