RECYCLING AFTER A TRASHATHON

December 2008

After the litter clean-ups, we usually leave the big Adopt-A-Highway bags full of recyclables by the curb next to our trash and one of the neighborhood recyclers comes by and picks up the bags.  The last two weeks, nobody took the recyclables (too cold? ill? moved?).  We had almost five Adopt-A-Highway bags full.

I decided to recycle the stuff myself.  The recycling center requires the items to be pre-sorted into three categories -- plastic, glass, and aluminum -- which I did.  To be perfectly honest, the number of aluminum cans is slightly inflated because Sabine and I drink soft drinks in aluminum cans, and they were included in the mix. 

The results:

HALF a bag of glass bottles
 ONE bag of aluminum cans Almost THREE BAGS of plastic bottles


STATISTICS FROM THE RECYCLING CENTER

14 pounds of glass = $1.08 7.5 pounds of aluminum cans = $16.35 31 pounds of plastic = $3.41

That's a total of $20.86 for our efforts! You can see that aluminum is king in the recycling world, which is why recyclers spend their time picking up cans and not bottles.