Home Recycling Ideas for 2011
© Peter Kaminski
Brighthub.com has some tips and home recycling ideas for homeowners this year. The first step is to identify which items are recyclable. A recycling idea for the home is setting up a home recycling center.
A home recycling center consists of separate bins that are used for different recyclable products. Another interesting home recycling idea is to make a compost pile in the garden with 50 percent carbon rich materials like dried leaves and dirt and 50 percent nutrient rich materials like vegetable peels and grass. Using a compost toilet is a unique home recycling idea wherein one can save a lot of water by mixing human waste with a substrate like peat moss to make fertilizer for the garden.
Madison, NJ expands recycling ideas
© subflux
They Mayor of Madison, NJ has announced that the city will promote a number of recycling ideas to enhance the existing program. Beginning March 14 the borough co-mingled containers recycling program will now accept all plastic containers numbered 1 through 7. (Numbers are located on the bottoms of plastic containers inside a triangular recycling symbol).
The city recycling program previously only accepted containers numbered 1 and 2. This is part of an expanded effort to reduce the amount of solid waste garbage the city sends to the transfer stations, due to the fact that the Morris County Municipal Utilities Authority has raised tipping fees another $4 per ton. Madison typically sends more than 5,000 tons of garbage to the transfer station each year. In addition to saving money and reducing garbage waste, the city will also make money back from Recycle America, the company that receives and markets the recyclable materials.
Building a Recycling Business
© spotreporting
MBA student Ron Gonen came up with the idea for a recycling business called Recyclebank. Seven years later, his company has stopped an estimated billion pounds of waste from hitting landfills. The business now operates in 29 states and the UK, helping cities to reduce landfill fees by weighting what residents recycle and awarding them points to spend at local merchants and big chains.
Cities pay Recyclebank for every ton of trash it diverts from landfills, and marketers buy ads on its website. Mr. Gonen turned over management of the company to Jonathan Hsu, and at age 36 he took up an environmental leadership fellowship at the Aspen Institute and a teaching position at his former alma mater, Columbia Business School. Recyclebank was formerly know as Recycle Rewards, and it recently ranked as No. 4 on the Wall Street Journal's Top 50 Venture-Funded Companies list, and No. 1 on the Top 10 Clean-Tech Companies list.