Recycling has made huge gains in the last couple decades. The rate of municipal waste that gets recycled more than doubled in 2010 to 34 percent from 16 percent in 1990, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Still, about half of the nation’s 225 million metric tons of annual trash gets the "one and done" treatment. Even though virtually every object contains recyclable materials, much of our waste ends up being incinerated or dumped in a landfill.

Recycling is not as effective as it could be—in part because collection services vary widely from city to city, which residents can find confusing. And local waste management firms can only handle so many kinds of recyclable refuse.

Niche recycling projects, however, have sprung up to catch some of the waste that falls through the cracks, giving many everyday products and their raw materials second lives. This Earth Day, to help consumers cut into that heap, here is a slide show of 10 surprising items that can be recycled and reused through programs big and small.

» View the 10 Suprising Recycling Efforts Slide Show

7 Comments

1. 1. kiteman 11:56 AM 4/21/12

   Why don't they convert old jeans into new cotton yarn and re-make new jeans? And what is an old wax crayon? Why don't people use them up until they are too small to handle? The best project is the tennis ball re-bouncer. Nothing has to be re-made.I think old plastic should be ground into sand like particles and use as a soil lightening filler. It doesn't matter that it will not degrade. After all, sand doesn't.

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2. 2. engineer.sci 02:44 AM 4/22/12

   I used to find the the recycling effort at my 7 year old's elementary school was wonderful and cute. Then one day, seeing how much the winner of the recycling effort for the month brought in from home, it dawned on me that the winner's family were not the most "earth-friendly" folk, but the biggest consumers and wasters of natural resources in the school! And as to the recycling itself, exactly how much net savings of energy and unwanted byproduct results through such processing one wonders. But even were it the most efficient of efficient -- it remains a poor joke, a pathetic little lie for kids Earth day school posters.
   
   Here's the reality for grownups:
   
   We live in an ever-growing consumerist economy, driven by paper, glossy, electronic, and billboard (electronic too now, actually) media for hire -- trained in the subtle art of mass psychological manipulation. We are trained to buy the "latest and greatest" of what we neither need nor actually enjoy even as a creature comfort. And if our subconscious is not programmed sufficiently for premature obsolescence, self-destruct gets purposely designed in. This beyond needless duplication in competition where its the marketing and packaging, not product quality, that counts. And the cost of armies of marketing, legal, etc., to make this all happen.
   
   The forgetting what this is doing to the planet, we must understand what this is doing to us all. The 7 billion of us could be well-fed, housed, clothed, and fairly comfortable (and not just by third world standards), were all the pure waste and exploitation entropy taken out of the system.
   
   Don't get me wrong, I certainly support recycling efforts, even if it takes a year's worth to buy our civilization one extra day. That is, as long as we realize that it is all a side show. But if it distracts us from the real issues, then I would prefer substituting Earth Day will "Get-Serious-Before-Its-Too-Late" Day in which we purposely toss our aluminum cans and plastics into the regular trash to wake us up.

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3. 3. rmsutton in reply to engineer.sci 11:28 AM 4/22/12

   Yes, REDUCE, REUSE, then Recycle. Those first two are the most important but hardest for people to grasp.

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4. 4. IslandGardener 03:01 AM 4/23/12

   There's an excellent book which challenges us to rethink the way we make our stuff, where it comes from, and what it becomes. Its authors make the case that we need to use materials in a genuinely circular way, truly recycling them for ever, like the materials used by living organisms.
   It's by Micaheal Braungart and William McDonough and is called 'Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things', 2002.
   http://www.mcdonough.com/cradle_to_cradle.htm
   

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5. 5. IslandGardener 03:08 AM 4/23/12

   Sorry kiteman (#1), I know that adding ground-up plastic to soil might sound helpful, but this is really not a good idea. Plastic is not biodegradable, so adding plastic to soil would not be recycling - it would be littering. And not just ordinary littering but irreversible and irresponsible littering. The smaller a piece of litter is the harder it is to pick it up. Picking up the dust of something is impossible.
   Poisoning soil organisms with plastic dust would be pollution, not recycling.
   Plastic is not chemically the same as sand.

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6. 6. IslandGardener in reply to IslandGardener 03:09 AM 4/23/12

   Oops, Michael (not Micaheal!) Braungart and William McDonough are the authors of 'Cradle to Cradle'.

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7. 7. BlindWanderer 09:29 PM 4/23/12

   I recycled a trophy once. Got a new plaque for it and in the dark of night slipped it in the trophy case at school. It was an old trophy so I slipped it in with the older trophies. Still there commemorating the best senior prank. ^_^

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