Think carefully about upgrades: Do you really need to upgrade to a bigger, newer, more flashy version? Flashy new stuff is overrated, especially if your old equipment works well. If you think you need more space, say on an iPod, you may not. Don’t tell me you listen to every song you own every day – transfer some old ones to your computer or another hard drive.

Can you fix it?: If you can fix your equipment for a decent price, you’ll expand its lifespan, save resources, and save cash. This is a choice to weigh carefully though. If you have a big appliance or electronic item, it might be better to buy a newer, more energy efficient version and recycle the old less energy efficient one.

Look at the company: Buy products that come from companies who have recycling programs in place. If you’re getting rid of something, check with the company for a program as well.

Buy energy efficient: Look for the Energy Star label. Not only is Energy Star good for you – saves you money and energy, but this label is a big plug for the earth. Because the label exists, manufacturers have a label to aim for. The label allows energy efficient products to be more prevalent, so buy them over non-Energy Star items.

Look to eBay: I’m not personally into eBay; all that bidding and stuff is confusing to me. However, eBay does have a cool Rethink Initiative going on. The Rethink site offers “Information, tools and solutions that make it easy – and even profitable – to find new users for idle computers and electronics, and responsibly recycle unwanted products.”

Recycle: After thinking a purchase through you can donate an older, but still working piece of equipment to a local non-profit or a company that will do this for you. You can also swap your equipment or give it to a recycling organization. If you don’t know where to recycle, Earth 911 is one of the best general recycling resources; they can help you find out how to recycle almost anything.

Bonus tip: brush up on your basic recycling terms: Recycling Terms You Should Know Part One and Part Two.

Are you getting new electronics this holiday season?

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It’s full of lots of good info, and I pulled out a few that might particularly interest you. Jennifer wrote the first three posts below a few months ago, before I joined Tree Hugging Family. They deal with specialized recycling questions, like what to do with prescription bottles.

How to Recycle Prescription Bottles

Smart Paint Disposal

Aerosol Product Recycling

Also, don’t forgot to brush up on your basic recycling terms:

Recycling Terms You Should Know Part One and Part Two

Do you have any recycling questions?

Click here to learn about all the current contests, themes, and green challenges going on at Tree Hugging Family in May 2008

Post from: Tree Hugging Family

Here’s what’s cool and new in green topics around the web this week. Oh, and a totally random picture I like. We can all use a little rural farm field now and then.

Why You Should Wait Until 2010 to Buy a New Car – from Greensense. Just a note, Greensense is a little funky in how they’re set up, it’s not totally user friendly, and I’m not sure why the writers refuse to hit enter, but this new car post is a good read. Just didn’t want you to think I was sending you to a bizarre site with no forethought. Oh, it’s not shut down your computer funky though – it’s a safe site. No worries.

A product that kills mold but that’s safe enough to drink! Interesting – I’ll be looking more into this topic for sure.

Try living in a bamboo home before you buy one. Actually, I did a post on this same company at Offbeat a while back, but of course, with a focus on the home cool factor vs. trying one out.

Turtles to be climate change canaries: Love turtles and hate climate change, so this is a nice read.

We just went over recycling terms here at THF this week so it was very timely of the Organic Consumers Association to put out this handy guide – Do You Know What Plastic Recycling Symbols Mean? A great read. One for the fridge.

As always, Tracy at EcoStreet has cool info you absolutely need – The world’s greenest books – which by the way, really do sound like the greenest books possible. Very nice.

What are you reading this week? 

[cool and completely random rural farm photo via stock.xchng]

Post from: Tree Hugging Family

We used to be able to look at a container, note the recycle logo and feel happy. Now there are some terms thrown in that might throw you.

Pre-consumer: When a package says “Pre-consumer” it’s referring to the actual waste made during a manufacturing process. This means no-one used the item ever, but it was recycled into something new. This is not the best situation because it creates energy waste that benefited no one. Such as the thick Sunday paper no one buys. It’s not used, but it did take energy and trees to make

The good news is that at least it’s being recycled. Other items that end up as pre-consumer are items never meant for consumers. An example is trimmings from when a company makes envelopes or notebook paper.

Post-consumer: As you might have guessed, post-consumer is material that is used by consumers before being recycled. So say you did buy that Sunday paper, then you recycle it, that’s post-consumer material now.

The same goes for any object, not just paper. It could be a plastic container, a glass milk jug, any item. Now, it’s better to buy post-consumer because obviously we’re reusing items to a greater capacity. That said, currently humans barely recycle – honestly we as a group of humans on the planet recycle far under 50% total of what we could. It’s terrible. So, pre-consumer is still far better than nothing. But if you have a choice choose high post-consumer material products.

I hope the terms today and yesterday help you on your recycling journey. It’s nice sometimes to have everything laid out.

To learn more read:

• US Postal Service Helps You Recycle
• School Waste Reduction
• Who Said Plastic Bags Are Good for Nothing?
• Trash Control
• Two Weeks Worth of Reuse

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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.

Post from: Tree Hugging Family