In honor of America Recycles Day on November 15, RecycleNOW Philadelphia is calling on YOU to help start a recycling program in your office, apartment building, or condominium. The City of Philadelphia’s commercial recycling regulations require that all commercial buildings– including businesses, apartment buildings of more than six units, and schools – provide recycling for their employees and/or tenants.
Commercial buildings are required to prepare and submit a recycling plan, provide recycling and containers for employees and/or tenants, and use a hauler or recycling company that is licensed by the City of Philadelphia. For all recyclables, commercial buildings must provide for separation of these items from regular trash up-front. If a hauler or a building manager/owner says that you can combine recyclables with trash, and that they will be separated off-site, they are not being recycled!
RecycleNOW will work with you to bring a recycling program to your building by helping you gather tenant support and to work with building management. If you’d like to work with RecycleNOW to implement a recycling program please contact Katie Edwards at kedwards@cleanair.org.
Major Retailers Work to Reduce Waste
As the holidays approach, it is especially important to be waste conscious. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an additional 5 million tons of waste is generated during the holidays in the U.S. Four million tons of this waste is wrapping paper and shopping bags. To fight waste CVS and Target are offering shoppers incentives for bringing their own reusable bags. CVS has introduced its “Green Bag Tag” which gives shoppers $1 in credits toward merchandise for every four times they use a reusable bag. Target has a simpler approach and gives shoppers 5 cents for each reusable bag they use.
Home Depot is running two programs, one to recycle old drills and their batteries and one to recycle old energy-sapping holiday lights. Many old handheld drills run on nickel cadmium (NiCad) batteries which leak dangerous toxins into the environment when not properly disposed of. From now until November 8, Home Depot will recycle your old drill and its batteries and give you 15 percent off a new drill with safer lithium-ion batteries. From November 8 through 15, Home Depot will also recycle your old holiday lights and give you a $3-off coupon towards the purchase of energy efficient LED lights.
Upcoming Meeting and Events
RecycleNOW Northwest Philadelphia Chapter Meeting: Tuesday, November 3, 7:15 p.m. - 9:00 p.m. Unitarian Church, Lincoln Drive & Wayne Ave.
Myth: The City throws out recycling that has food waste on it
Fact: This is a slightly more complicated myth with some gray area. If a container has a little bit of food residue on it, it will still get recycled. It is best to rinse out and clean containers before putting them in the recycling so the system at Blue Mountain Recycling (where the city takes all of its recycling) can accurately sort them and can maintain the quality of the materials they produce by minimizing the residue.
Here is what a representative from Blue Mountain told us:
"Do people need to waste gallons and gallons of water in order to thoroughly clean each container? No, but at the same time we don't want to get plastic tubs full of peanut butter or ketchup because either they won't sort correctly in our system and will end up with the residue or they'll contaminate the outbound commodity."
So, you should make an effort to rinse out your containers and get as much of the food residues off as possible, but if you couldn't get every last bit of peanut butter off the jar or if you happen to be somewhere without access to a sink, you can still recycle it.
