EcoTrashSolutions

Reduce Waste, Find Your Old Belongings a New Home

Over the past century America has grown to become an extremely wasteful society.  The portion sizes provided at not only fast food chains, but most American restaurants, are unreal.  Or stop to think of how many times you’ve thrown away old clothes or furniture that could have easily been reused by someone else.  American industries encourage the constant purchase of the newest product and disposal of the old, whether or not this is necessary.  A culture change to incorporate more sparing and less-wasteful behavior should be considered, but encouraging simple habits such as recycling is a much easier change to come about. Read the rest…

Don’t Forget the First Two Steps

“Reduce, Re-use, Recycle” is a longstanding, simple mantra to explain the process that protects the health of our planet.  While the campaign to recycle has certainly caught on across the globe over the past 2 decades, the reducing and re-using parts of the three-pronged strategy are often overlooked.  Here are some simple tips and reminders to make sure the first 2 steps are taken care of, before you even recycle your used goods.

1. The process should start at your purchase decision not when you are disposing of old items.  A lot of similar products, both in price and function, are packaged very differently. Unless the packaging itself has some sort of intrinsic value you will want to hold on to as a keepsake, choose the one with the least packaging. Once your purchase is unwrapped, the box or bag it came in is more than likely to end up in the bin anyway.
2. A lot of grocery stores now offer re-usable bags, giving you an environmentally sound option when asked “paper or plastic?”  Both paper and plastic bags require valuable natural resources for their production, so any way you can cut down on their usage is a step in the right direction. Read the rest…