By Green Team of Carbon County
The Green Team of Carbon County has been working diligently to increase the awareness of the need to recycle and to increase the availability of recycling opportunities in the Carbon County area. They recently wrapped up a successful E-waste collection day in conjunction with Helper City and MeTech Recyclers. The green team plans to host more E-waste recycling events in the near future.
The green team has been expanding places that they have paper and aluminum recycling trailers for community use. Locally owned J&B recyclers are now emptying the trailers and are trying to keep up with the great response from the community’s recycling efforts.
Looking ahead, the team knows that from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, household waste increases by more than 25 percent. This extra trash, mostly food, shopping bags, product packaging and wrapping paper adds up to an additional one million tons of waste per week that is sent to U.S. landfills, according to the EPA.
There are many steps you can take that will help you reduce your holiday trash. Start by trying to reduce the packaging you bring home. Take re-usable bags with you when you shop and think about buying products that use less packaging when you can.
Think outside the box when looking for gifts. Classes, memberships to fitness centers or museums as well as donations to a person’s favorite charity can be done with no packaging at all. Cookies and baked goods in a reusable tin or dish are also a low impact way to give.
Reduce waste when wrapping presents by using things you have around the house. Scraps of material, comic pages and plain brown paper can be used to create some cute and lovely packages. There are also Christmas wrapping papers made of recycled paper. Use newspaper as cushioning instead of packing peanuts when you ship.
Save gift bags and decorated boxes and bows to use again and again. Buy a bin to store them in so you have them on hand to reuse. Wrapping paper that cannot be re-used can be recycled. Fold it up and take it to the trailers with your newspapers. J&B will accept all wrapping paper for recycling. You may also take cardboard packaging directly to their recycling yard at 798 South 800 East in Price. They will even pay you a penny a pound for the cardboard you bring in. For more information on what they can take for recycling at J&B, call Scott at (435) 650-6323.
While our wide open space may make it feel like we have amply room for garbage here in the Carbon County area, we still need to look at ways to reduce our impact. The less garbage we generate means less resources were used to create that garbage in the first place.
The Green Team of Carbon County will continue to find ways to help improve the quality of life while making in convenient to recycle, re-use and re-purpose things in our day-to-day lives.