ecycler, a new way to recycle online!

From excessive junk on property to hoarding, cities across the country are dealing with the problem of how to deal with residents’ excessive stuff.

In Arlington, MA, a hoarding response team made up of police, a mental health expert and the Health and Human Services department is helping hoarders clear their homes of junk before they suffer health and safety problems.

Excessive piles of household items and food and unclean conditions can attract bugs and rodents.

What started as part of a jail diversion program in June has since become focused on the broader problem of hoarding. The team has handled 16 cases so far, including that of a man who had no plumbing and didn’t know what to do about it because his apartment hadn’t been cleaned in two decades.

Chicago’s solution to junk? Fine people for it. The city, which is aiming to balance its budget in part by raising fees on a number of items, plans to raise nuisance fines to between $300 and $600, up from $250 to $500, for such violations as illegal garbage dumping, excessive junk and poor lot maintenance.

Los Angeles is facing the problem of homeless people’s possessions taking up space on the sidewalks of Skid Row, a 50-block area where mentally ill or addicted people sleep on the street and where everyday appliances and mattresses are piling up. Stuff started accumulating ever since a federal judge ordered the city four months ago to stop seizing property from Skid Row streets.

According to a recent newspaper article, one block alone was lined with 20 packed shopping carts.

Courts across the country have likewise ruled that the property of homeless people cannot be seized just because it’s on the street. But, Los Angeles has lost four lawsuits over property seizures since 1987.

Visit chicago.ecycler.com

We are making junk removal simple, problem free and without surprises. We are born out of the idea that we can enhance the social value of recycling. All junk collected is treated as an asset and not as trash with the appreciation toward sustainability and end-of-life concerns.

We make all efforts to reuse (i.e., donate), upcycle and recycle the materials before the landfill is considered.

Thanks to LA Weekly for use of the images

Support is growing for expansion of Massachusetts bottle bill.

The state’s bottle bill now requires deposits only on soda and beer bottles and cans, but lawmakers are trying to expand the 5-cent deposit to also include bottled water, sports drinks and other beverage containers.

Almost half of the cities and towns in Massachusetts have passed resolutions supporting the expansion and a recent poll found that 77 percent of the public supports it.

Supporters say the bill will improve recycling rates. About 80 percent of soda and other containers covered under the existing bottle deposit law are redeemed or recycled but only an estimated 22 percent of other uncovered bottles are recycled, according to the Sierra Club’s Massachusetts chapter.

The Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection issued a report recently stating that bottle return machines have the capacity to accept more containers of different types. The agency also said municipalities could save a combined $7 million a year in avoided trash costs under expected improvements in recycling.

But some businesses oppose the expansion because they say it adds cost for the retailers that have to accept the deposits and for beverage distributors that have to pay redemption centers.

Retail groups and beverage manufacturers say the money would be better spent improving curbside recycling programs.

Advocates have been pushing for an expanded bottle bill for years, and now there are 13 different bills pending that would make changes to the state’s bottle deposit law, including one that would repeal it altogether.

The bills would also re-establish a Clean Environment Fund so that unreturned deposit money can be set aside for recycling and environmental projects and boost a fee that beverage distributors pay to bottle redemption centers.

Current MA bottle bill: http://www.mass.gov/dep/recycle/reduce/bbillcon.htm

Almost every household item, from tennis balls to old cell phones, can be recycled –  if you know where to take them.

Many recycling centers only accept the usual suspects – newspapers, aluminum cans and plastic or glass bottles – but there is value and potential reuse in almost everything around your house.  And there are a lot of businesses that allow people to ship them items that the average recycling center or curbside program won’t accept. Some such services will send you a prepaid shipping label so that you don’t have to pay to recycle your item while others require you to pay the shipping cost.

With the advent of digital music and downloadable movies, many households have CDs and DVDs that they no longer use. Many homes and businesses also frequently upgrade their computers and components, leading to extra hard drives lying around.

CDs and DVDs are made of high value recyclable material such as polycarbonate plastic and precious metals.  It is estimated that it will take over a million years for a CD to completely decompose in a landfill.

Another common item found in homes and businesses is Styrofoam, which is one of the hardest materials to recycle because of food contamination. But there are places where you can mail your styrofoam dishes to be recycled.

There are even companies that recycle old tennis balls. Rebounces.com repressurizes dead balls, restoring them to their original bounce.

So next time you plan to toss out something that your city or local recycling facility won’t accept, do a quick search online to see if you can ship the item to a business that specializes in recycling it or go to ecycler and check out the shippable recyclable section where you can print shipping labels pre-populated with addresses to these specialized recyclers.

On ecycler, all you have to do is click on “start recycling” and scroll down to the list of shippable items. You can select from among discs, crayons, tennis balls, alkaline batteries, wine corks, VHS tapes, inkjet cartridges, eyeglasses and keys. Once you indicate how many of those items you have to recycle, you will be taken to your dashboard, where you can view the transaction and print out a customized printing label so that you can ship them off. Ecycler also will e-mail you the shipping label, along with shipping instructions for each type of item.

Maine’s bottle bill is at risk of being vastly modified, if not totally dismantled.

Lawmakers in Maine have made various attempts to modify the state’s 33-year-old bottle bill, which mandates a refund for people who recycle beverage containers. Beverage distributors have lobbied for a repeal of the bill, citing concerns about fraud and inefficiency.

One lawmaker has proposed a bill that would study whether to replace the bottle bill with a  curbside recycling program. The Natural Resources Council of Maine has argued that replacing the deposit collection system could lead to job losses, reduced recycling rates and more litter.

The current law states that larger containers, such as wine and liquor bottles, have a 15-cent deposit. Another proposed bill would exempt all bottles over 28 ounces from deposits.

Yet another bill would reduce the number of pickups beverage distributors would have to make to a redemption center. Currently, distributors must pick up all empty containers from a retailer when making a delivery. The proposed bill would require pickup once a store has generated $750 worth of containers, or once a month.

Those concerned with the various proposals contend that they would undermine recycling efforts in the state by providing less incentive for individuals and distributors to recycle.

Information on the existing Maine Bottle Bill.

Collectors come to ecycler not only to get recyclables to redeem for cash, but to turn refuse into art.

A Brooklyn-based artist whose glass pieces were featured in the New York Times inquired about collecting plastic bottles, especially Evian bottles, for her work. Her friends save their used plastic bottles for her so that she can repurpose them into beautiful vases and bowls, but she needs to collect items on a larger scale.

Ecycler has received queries from other artists seeking to fashion art out of recyclables, thus opening up a new user base we hadn’t even thought of when creating the site. Ecycler will be featuring an artist named Journi who recently acquired 100 bottles from ecycler’s Recycling Exchange in an upcoming blog posting.

Aluminum, bottles and newspapers (remember those papier-mâché projects from grade school?) are perfect for art projects. School kids and professional artists alike are possible consumers of ecycler.

It just goes to show that one man’s trash really is another’s treasure.

More on the Brooklyn Artist: Shari Mendelson

Thanks GreenWineBottles for use of their image

We used to think it was a shame to let any recyclable household item go into the waste bin, so we were surprised to learn that it’s not necessary to recycle alkaline batteries.

Batteries can be categorized as either single-use (primary cell) batteries or rechargeable (secondary cell) batteries. Each type requires special instructions to ensure it’s properly recycled (or discarded). The majority of consumer batteries for household use fall within these types:

• Alkaline
• Zinc-carbon
• Button cell (lithium manganese or silver oxide)
• Lithium (Li-ion)
• Nickel-cadmium (NiCd)
• Nickel metal hydride (NiMH)
• Lead-based (automotive and non-automotive)

It turns out that some battery manufacturers, like Duracell and Energizer, have eliminated all of the added mercury from its alkaline batteries, so they can now be safely discarded along with normal household waste. The other components of the batteries — steel, zinc and manganese — don’t pose health or environmental risks in the solid waste stream, according to Duracell, and those metals are difficult to recover from batteries.

We learned this by reading a blog written by an environmentally minded person named Will Taft — willtaft.com — who did some research into the proper disposal of alkaline batteries. He even found this comment from the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA):

“Alkaline batteries are not recyclable. They’ll just be thrown out in a landfill, or at the most a hazardous waste landfill.”

Rechargeable batteries are a different story, though — they can contain mercury, cadmium, lead, and lithium, and therefore should be recycled. Car batteries and other lead-based batteries should also be recycled.

Alkaline batteries have several advantages: they last for a long time, perform well at high and low temperatures and have a long storage life. They can be stored at room temperature for two years and retain 90 percent of their original capacities.

It’s important to handle them properly, however. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warns that if potassium hydroxide, which is contained within the cells of alkaline batteries, leaks out, it can cause chemical burns on skin or in your eyes.

And, Duracell warns people never to dispose of alkaline batteries by fire, because they could explode. Duracell also says not to dispose of large amounts of alkaline batteries together. Used batteries are often not completely “dead,” and grouping them can bring these “live” batteries into contact with one another, creating safety risks.

Most sources say that more than 150,000 tons of single-use batteries are tossed into landfills each year. Send your alkaline batteries to ecycler HQ and we’ll take action to properly dispose of the batteries.

Buy rechargeable batteries!

Did you know that it really does pay to recycle? The pop cans and old pipes laying around the house have value, and turning those items into cash is easy — if you know where to look.

The easiest items to cash in are those made from aluminum, such as beverage cans, foil and tins used for baking. Most buy-back centers in the area accept aluminum and pay an average of $0.50 per pound for it.

However, most places don’t list the prices they pay on their websites; you have to call for quotes. It pays to save up recyclables until you have a large amount to drop off. The more aluminum cans, for example, the more you’ll get for them.

A-1 Recycling, of Fox Lake, pays $0.55 per pound for aluminum cans, but for deposits of more than 25 pounds, they pay $0.57 per pound.

Many buy-back centers still don’t pay for plastic bottles and newspapers, but there are other household items people don’t typically set out in their recycling bins that can be redeemed for cash. Batteries and copper wire, for example, can be recycled for money. American Metals Company in Chicago pays $3 for car batteries while A-1 Recycling pays $2.25 for every pound of copper house wire.

For people who have batteries they wish to discard and just want to dispose of them properly but don’t care about making money from them, the city of Chicago has a battery collection program in which alkaline and rechargeable batteries — but not lead-acid car batteries — can be deposited at any Chicago Public Library or Walgreens Drug Store in the city.

When it comes to copper, different centers quote different prices, depending on the type of copper, be it wire or tubing, and whether it is soldered or not. Most places say they need to see the copper and won’t provide price quotes over the phone.

The easiest way to find drop-off centers in Chicago is to visit earth911.com, which requires people to input both their zip code and the type of recyclables they have in order to find the listing of buy-back centers. There is also a web page on the Chicago Recycling Coalition — http://www.chicagorecycling.org/sites.htm — which lists buy-back centers for all types of recyclables. The information isn’t obvious from the home page, but if you search for recyclables by type, you can find a link that lists the centers where the items can be taken. It also has an interactive map showing the locations of all of the city recycling centers.

We, at ecycler, are always interested in learning about new things that can be recycled, but we had no idea that oyster shells could be reused until we came across an interesting article on TreeHugger.com.

The Oyster Recovery Partnership Shell Recycling Alliance collects oyster shells from restaurants and returns them to the Chesapeake Bay, where new oysters inhabit them.

According to National Geographic, “without some sort of base, be it shells, stones, or reef balls, similar to what are used to help restore coral reefs, the adult oysters sink into the muddy river bottom and die.”

Restoring oyster habitat is good for the environment. According to the Tree Hugger article, oysters serve as natural water filters and as natural coastal buffers that help protect shorelines.

The year-old Oyster Recovery Partnership Shell Recycling Alliance collects used shells from about 50 restaurants in the Maryland-Virgina-DC area. The group has already collected almost two million oyster shells.

We built ecycler.com with flexibility in mind–this gives us the ability to quickly add new materials and add them to specific regions (or the entire US and Canada). For example, we’ve recently added composting to one state–Pennsylvania–as an assessment of its viability.

If you have suggestions, or have a supply of oyster shells, please feel free to contact us.

Utilizing wikis, which are web sites that allow others to edit the content, is important for businesses.

The most well known wiki is Wikipedia, which contains information on companies and people and just about everything else. Because Wikipedia entries are often the first things that show up when people conduct an online search for a well-known person or business, the content is viewed widely by people and is often unquestioned. So for a business that already is featured on Wikipedia, it’s important to monitor the information that’s been posted, correct anything that’s wrong and update it frequently, so that it’s fresh.

ecycler’s entry in Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ecycler

People can also create their own wikis, like we did for ecycler. By creating your own wiki you can populate it with wiki entries that are specific to your company or project.

For example, we created a wiki entry for the Fairfield Challenge: http://wiki.ecycler.com/wiki/index.php/Fairfield_Challenge.

It’s important to be in the venues where your customers are congregating, so blogging and participating in forums like wikis are good places to interact with and communicate to the people using your product or service.

Decking the halls with boughs and holly isn’t the only way to be green during the holidays.

Here are ten ways to make your holiday festivities environmentally friendly:

1. Use an artificial Christmas tree, so long as it’s not made with PVC, or polyvinyl chloride.
2. If you can’t resist the smell of fresh pine, buy a potted tree and plant it outside afterward or mulch your tree after the holidays (many cities will collect trees and mulch them for residents).
3. Wrap gifts in newspaper or other papers already around the house.
4. Set your holiday lights to a timer so that you don’t accidentally leave them on all night.
5. Buy LED holiday lights.
6. Compost your holiday meal scraps.
7. In lieu of giving traditional gifts, make a donation to your favorite environmental organization in the recipient’s name.
8. Buy holiday cards made with recycled paper.
9. Use cranberries, fruits, nuts and popcorn to trim trees and decorate the mantel — then eat them after the holidays.
10. Make your own menorah out of just about any household item and use organic beeswax candles.

Happy Holidays from ecycler.com!

Thanks to http://eco2o.com/ for the use of their image.