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In the current state of the environment, where global warming, land degradation, and the slow poisoning of the natural sources of water are peak, recycling has become somewhat of a solution for ordinary people who want to do something on their end to save the environment.
People have been practicing the 3 “R” s (Reduce, Reuse, Recycle) in their ways, as much as possible, in the hope that the damage of so many decades can be undone. Moving forward with the concept of recycling waste, people have come up with a far more innovative way of recycling waste from their households- creating a Home Recycling Centre.
A home recycling Centre is a system where you can keep collecting all the items that have the potential of being recycled into something useful around your home and then taking it to the nearest redemption center to get recycled.
Why Do We Recycle?
Recycling is the process of converting waste materials into new usable products. The ability to be recycled depends on the original object’s properties and helps lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Recycling can prevent the waste of materials that can be potentially useful and reduce the consumption of fresh raw materials, reducing energy, air pollution, water pollution, and land degradation.
Recycling is often believed to be a noble initiative and an easy one at that. However, to stop throwing stuff away in the trash, for real, instead of taking those extra steps to recycle, making this process easier said than done.
But, by giving a little thought to it, and planning towards this direction, step by step with the help of some organizations and developing some personal habits and practices, daily, something that might seem like a lot of work might change into a daily practice which will consume time out of your routine but will reap great rewards for the environment, in the long run. Home recycling centers are a great way to cultivate this habit.
How to Create a Home Recycling Centre
The following are a few tips you must keep in mind: creating yourself and your family a Home Recycling Centre.
LEARN THE REGULATIONS OF YOUR LOCALITY, RULES ABOUT RECYCLING (WHAT HAS TO BE RECYCLED?), AND HOW TO GO ABOUT IT?
The foremost step you need to take towards creating a Home Recycling Centre is to find out what kinds of items can be recycled in your locality, as each township and locality has different rules and regulations for recycling waste, and how you can collect them for recycling. It is compulsory to recycle a given list of items in many regions ins while recycling is done voluntarily in other areas.
Furthermore, every locality is different. Whether they will pick up the stuff you need to get recycled or take it to the center on your own varies from area to area. There are also differences in the lists of things that can be sent for recycling and how to go about it.
How you should group the items and go in tandem with the rules and regulations are varied. These rules are essential in deciding the kind of trash cans and recycling bins, containers you must use, and their location inside your home.
For creating a Home Recycling Centre with the capability to utilize all the “trash optimally,” it’s essential for you and your fellow recyclers to be adept at the rules and use them as a guide to help with the rest of the steps.
Most municipal offices and redemption centers have the rules for recycling for reference to understand layout if required.
Ensure that you have a copy of these pages and paste them somewhere for your quick reference, preferably near the home recycling Centre that you wish to create. This will turn out to be convenient for you if you forget a rule or need to be reminded.
You’ll be able to refer to it and see what you wanted to know quite effortlessly, most of the time, and make it simpler for yourself to keep updating your recycling plan according to the rules without any unnecessary hassles.
Where to Collect and Store items that Need to be Recycled in your home
This step in creating a Home Recycling Centre is to come up with a place in your house where you want to collect your recyclable items. But first, you need to categories the items:
- Paper
- Plastic
- Glass
- Metallic Items
According to the rules set by the local recycling center, you might or might not have to segregate the recycle bins depending on each group of the items. If you must separate them, you will need to be more careful with space utilization because several containers will require more space. In this case, having stacking bins is your best possible solution since they need far less room.
Storage for Recycling, as Per Intervals
You must consider the number of recyclable items that will accumulate when they are taken away from your house and decide the kind of home recycling center bins to use.
If your local center picks up recycling from outside the house every week, you may have to buy some small bins to collect and store everything since it will be taken away from your house at small intervals.
But, if you have to take the recyclable items from your home recycling center to the local recycling center on your own, and the center is at a distance, you might as well collect more recyclable items in your home before they need to be taken away. In this situation, you will have to get larger collection bins.
Or you can stick to a short-term collection and take the items to the center regularly.
Weight of the container, and How to transport
If you’ve got to haul the recycling bin down a long way or choose to have a larger recycling bin or containers, you need to think about how you’ll transport the bin and its contents where you need them to be.
You might want to use something with wheels, though unfortunately, not all recycling bins come with wheels. You should consider its weight and choose a container with handles for ease of transportation.
If you choose to stack containers, you may want to consider mounting them on a rolling dolly so they can be wheeled out to the curb, or otherwise consider how you’ll move their contents from your home recycling center to the distribution center as necessary.
Create a Main Home Recycling Center and Satellite Collection Areas
The main room which will generate items to go in your home recycling center will be your kitchen. Thus the main area in your home to collect the recycled items should be near your kitchen.
Look in and around your kitchen for space to set up the recycling Centre for your home. You can either hide the containers behind the doors or put them in a mudroom or a utility room.
Other rooms that are sure to contribute to your center’s items are Bathrooms, Home Office, Laundry Room.
Human nature ignores the small trash in and around the house, making your house messy and the home recycling Centre not fulfilling its purpose. For this reason, it’s suggested you add small recycle bins to critical locations in your house so that when you finish a bottle of Fresca or want to throw away those pencil shavings, you won’t dump it in the garbage bin just because it was convenient.
The bins in some rooms do not need to be as large as those for the kitchen or the places in your house where the most recyclable items are generated. It just must be big enough to hold about a week’s worth of garbage from the room it has kept in.
For rooms that will not give you many items, you can place small trash baskets; remember, whatever the basket or the bin’s size, you must empty them regularly.
Any place where the trash can be generated easily (bathroom, laundry room) can place a plastic or metal bin for easy cleaning.
You can be creative with the idea of placing bins in the room, too, if you cannot make space for the bin or if they are coming in the way. Hanging the bins mounted inside a cabinet door can be a, for instance.
Label all the Recycling Bins and Containers, According to their Usage.
It is not clear to people which container holds which kind of trash and which one is for recycling. To eliminate this confusion, make sure to label all your recycling bins with the type of item they should contain.
If you have small children in your house, you can color-code your labels or put pictures on the labels to help them put their garbage in the right containers within your home recycling Centre.
A Kitchen Compost Bin
In the main categories of recycling listed above, another essential thing to recycle in your kitchen is your leftovers and waste from food items like vegetable peel, seeds, etc. All you need is a small kitchen compost bin to keep on your counter or somewhere else convenient in your kitchen to put scraps in until you add them to your compost pile.
You can also use old coffee cans or an old pot if you do not feel like getting a particular bin for your kitchen.
Disclaimer: Choose your bin’s size and type according to the time you want it to hold your scraps. But do remember, the longer you hold the scraps, the more you will be inviting pests and odors to your kitchen.
So, always keep in mind to empty your kitchen compost container time and again.
