Posts Tagged ‘recycling’

Nowadays all we hear about is how we should recycle everything to save our planet from danger. Do we really need to do this? Think about the fact that a single plastic shopping bag can take up to 1,000 years to totally decay. A thousand years is quite a long time for only one plastic bag. Estimate how many trash bags you use annually along with those plastic shopping bags. You’re talking about a good deal of plastic bags when you multiply that amount by the number of people living in our country. Rather than discarding it and waiting for it to decompose, we can recycle it so that it can be used again. Many other items are usually recycled, among them old tires being used in making playgrounds and plastic bags being used in clothing. Almost anything can be reused.

The town of Lemoore, California began a stringent recycling program 15 years ago. If Lemoore residents did not observe the recycling rules, they had to pay fines. Many of the people opted to comply and the town benefited immensely from recycling. They were able to construct a new playground as well as create a water park. They were able to fund other municipal requisites such as a police department and pre-school scholarships through their recycling. Thus, you can understand that recycling can produce money for other things as well as decrease the amount of trash going to the landfill.

Even though it may appear that the recycling efforts of one person can’t make a difference, multiply that small difference by everyone in the world and the results could be great. Land fill sites would be much smaller, meaning they are more low-cost to manage as well as not leaving a terrible scar on the surrounding area. Through recycling, we can take care of the earth and also help to make money for people in need. Everyone benefits.

Think about the quandary of animals even if you’re not genuinely into recycling. Issues in our environment including global warming are not merely destroying the environment but harming wildlife too. By simply spending a little time recycling, you’re saving the planet for the next generation to enjoy, just like you have.

Maybe you fail to see how long it actually takes every item you toss to decay As mentioned earlier, a plastic bag will take roughly 1,000 years to decompose. A glass jar may in reality take up to one million years to decompose and styrofoam may never decay at all while other things, such as disposable diapers and milk bottles, can take hundreds of years. Because all of these items are recyclable, why should we discard them?

Of course, currently we don’t have the technology to recycle several things but this could change soon. For now, there’s absolutely no reason we can’t recycle plastics, metals, and glass. It’s not difficult and doesn’t cost you anything so why not help towards saving our planet? If we all helped, a ton of good would be done.

As the consumption of paper climbs with book, paper and newsprint production, we inevitably lose a lot more trees. We are looking at the prognosis of waiting hundreds of years to replace them, which is a long time to wait. It is criticalcrucial nowadays that we see to it that we recycle and reuse paper.

All paper, including books and mags, are virtually entirely biodegradable, which is to say they don’t clog up landfill sites for numerous years and will simply degrade into nothing. The fact that there is a demand for more paper makes it look daft not to reuse as much as we can. That is why we must reuse and recycle.

The traditional method of recycling paper is by using recycling facilities. Numerous big supermarkets have recycling banks for paper and there are assigned recycling areas in many towns. Likewise, you can leave paper in special bin bags for the trash trucks to get (providing your town accommodates paper recycling). The operations for recycling paper can then begin so that in the end it can be usable again. This preserves the trees and the environment. There are issues with recycling paper because lots of paper, specifically mags and books, contain staples to keep the pages stuck together, making it more difficult to just recycle. To surmount several of these hurdles, companies will, for instance, utilize a magnet to keep the metal apart.

Furthermore, there are other ways of reusing old books and mags that most people tend to neglect. Magazines and books particularly contain a lot of information and knowledge that can be passed down to the next generations, so you can pass down books and mags to your children or grandchildren, or even other people. An old book will be of use to another person and it is not hard for us discard of it this way.

Your local library or charity is a good place to go if you have many books that you don’t want anymore. If you get hold of a local library, they might very well take magazines and old books assuming they have been fairly well kept. The library and the public will be more glad because they will have more reading choices. So rather then merely discarding a book or leaving it to pick up dust, consider giving it to a library.

If you opt to sell your books, you have numerousa lot of choices, including selling them on the Internet or at car boot sales. Selling your books on thee Web is now more effortless than ever so at places such as Amazon and eBay.

To sum it up, paper is being used more and more but we have fewer trees. We need trees for our planet’s health and the animals that depend on them. There is likely some way you can cast out your books, magazines and papers in a way that isn’t damaging to the environment, whether it be established recycling or giving away books.

When you see companies promoting printer cartridge recycling, it is sometimes easy to get deceived by these companies motivations. Sure it’s great to recycle, reuse and save the environmental resources required to produce new cartridges. However I’m afraid this doesn’t tell the whole truth. There is a much more environmentally friendly option to recycling toner cartridges, and that is refilling them.

Don’t be misled, there is no real reason that toner cartridges shouldn’t be refilled many times BEFORE they are recycled. This would cut waste dramatically, even if the cartridges were reused once there would be a huge saving in environmental costs. Multiplied across the world the world the benefits would be enormous. There is one main reason that the average toner cartridge is not refilled however, that is because the printer companies don’t want you to.

None of the components in a laser toner cartridge are so badly manufactured that they only last one print run, when the ink runs outs a printer cartridge would work perfectly well if it was refilled. In fact this is what used to happen especially with photocopiers in the passed, all the cartridges had little stoppers on them which you could pour toner ink to refill them. However the companies noticed if they took these stoppers out people had to buy new cartridges and their profits soared. Slowly over a year or two these all went, and the little stoppers seemed like a thing of the past.

But then many companies noticed that it was relatively easy to make you own hole and seal with a generic stopper by yourself and they started to sell kits. These kits allowed you to keep using the printer cartridge by refilling it with ink. It is something I do today, it takes a few minutes and involves no skill whatsoever (luckily for me). It is a great feeling to know that you can reuse these toner cartridges over and over again. Without the cost and expense of rebuilding, recycling or worse them ending up in landfill.

Why Printer Firms want Printer Cartridge Recycling

So how did our Green crusading printer companies react to this development, well it’s simple they put computer chips in their toner cartridges to stop you refilling them. They want you to use that cartridge once, and once only – by encouraging you to recycle that cartridge they maintain a ‘green persona’ whilst maximising their profits. Every time you refill a toner cartridge you are reducing their profits, the computer chips ensure that the toner cartridge won’t work until that too is reset. That computer chips sole purpose is to prevent you reusing and recycling yourself – by far the greenest option is actively prevented by the printing companies.

Sure you’ll hear horror stories about print quality, damage to your printer etc and even voiding of warranty. But let me reassure you about those, if you use quality toner the results will be no different to a new cartridge. There’s no risk of damage to your printer – you’re just refilling ink and even if there was in many instances the costs savings are so high you could buy a new printer after every other refill !

Fear not the companies who provide the refilling kits can in most cases. provide a replacement computer chip which will prevent the companies greedy practice of disabling them – it is annoying as it is another step but is pretty simple. So next time you look at the fancy green glossy recycling bag supplied to you with your expensive toner cartridge – remember at the heart of it is no environmental idealism, there is just the cynical maintaining of profits and their bottom line.

Give it a try, for the vast majority of printers you can add another stage before the printer cartridge recycling one. Refill the cartridges can save you hundreds believe me and it requires no special skill. There’s many firms around – the one I use is called Tonertopup but there are lots of others. Make sure they use quality compatible toner for each toner cartridge and you should save 80% of your running costs and do the world a favor.