Nonprofits You Should Know About - Ecocycle

If you've ever felt a twinge of guilt when you were cleaning out your closet and found all those old mixed tapes or dead batteries or unused gadgets and thought 'I can't just throw these out' but didn't know what to do so you snuck out to the dumpster after dark to shove them under the other trash...

then I've got a great resource for you. Ecocycle is located here in Boulder, CO but their website is an excellent resource for anyone in N. America who wants to help keep stuff out of landfills and contribute to recycling and reuse (and I'm not just saying that because I work for them now). There is a pull-down list of hard to recycle materials which gives you options for recycling like mail-in recycling or manufacturer "take-back" programs. Which, by the way, you should all promote and consider when choosing which brand to buy - when a company purposely makes a product out of toxic, non-renewable or non-recyclable parts YOU end up paying the cost by paying for trash hauling, landfill dumping or even recycling. If companies have to absorb the materials they produce when they've reached the end of their lifecycle it will make them think much more carefully about what goes into the products in the first place. A small but apt example is in Europe where bottled drink makers take back their bottles and reuse/recycle them, much more efficient then recycling aluminum or plastic containers!

So next time you've got something weird to dump, don't trash it, check out www.ecocycle.org or earth911.org to find out where you can recycle it. My personal favorites are the building material resource yards, you can find some cool junk in there!