Recycling Terms You Should Know – Part One

We talk a lot about recycling here, and I realized that we often just toss terms around. Here’s a quick primer to get your recycling know-how up to speed.

Recycling:  We all know what recycling is… or do we? When it comes right down to it, recycling means we collect materials that CAN actually be used again. A material must be able to be turned back into raw material and then into something new, or there’s no point in even trying to recycle an object.

Juice lids are one example. We can toss them in a recycle bin, but they can’t be re-made into anything, so we haven’t really recycled them, have we? To be sure that your recycling efforts aren’t for nothing, the first step is to only buy products that you’re positive can be recycled.

Reuse: Reuse is part of the recycling process (see above) however, reuse is also something we can do with objects that cannot be recycled.  Reuse means that we reuse an item, either for the same tasks or objective over and over, or that we think up a new and useful use for said object. Let’s use those juice jar lids from above again. Now we can’t recycle juice lids – can we re-use them? Why sure we can. Here are some of my ideas:

• To mix paints in (for a picture, not a house obviously).
• Make a big checker board out of recycled paper and paint some lids black.
• Hold beads that you’re working with to make a necklace.
• Turn them into dolhouse furniture – a sink, a fountain, a little stool.

What else can you think of?  

Tomorrow we’ll look at two more recycling terms.