Treehugger

Recycling your bottles and cans is definitely a good thing, and a good start toward cutting back on your waste and being a little greener, but there’s certainly more that you can do. Recycling isn’t just about putting stuff in the blue bin and putting it out on the street once a week; if something isn’t recycled by your local municipality, chances are that someone else can help you recycle it. If you aren’t excited about recycling, we even have some ways to help make recycling more fun.



1) Recyclebank [www.treehugger.com] will actually pay you to recycle your garbage. In their Philadelphia pilot project, a computer chip in recyclable garbage bin weighs the material which is then sold to the recyclers. Almost everybody wins: the municipality dumps less at landfill; the recycling plants get more material; the homeowner gets paid.
2) Along the same lines, read up on the world’s richest self-made woman [www.treehugger.com]; she’s a paper recycling entrepreneur. It’s not just all gathering empty soda bottles, you see.
3) Ecopod [www.treehugger.com] is a sleek little device that makes collecting and sorting recyclables a little more fun; it also helps compact your cans and plastics so you have more room to add more.



All that stuff is nice, but what do you do when your junk doesn’t go in the bin? We’ve got some ideas…
4) Can you really recycle a discarded umbrella into a couture gown that’s red-carpet ready? Rainer Wolter did [www.treehugger.com] (pictured above), and won TreeHugger’s Umbrella Inside Out competition with it.
5) Ubiquitous electronic media and CDs can add up quickly, but you don’t want to just pitch them in the trash; here’s our advice [www.treehugger.com] for recycling them.
6) When your jeans wear out, you don’t have to trash ‘em; Denim Therapy [www.treehugger.com] will help you fix up your old favorites so you can wear ‘em for another 10 years.
7) When jeans finally go to the big tailor in the sky, you can use ‘em as insulation [www.treehugger.com] in your home.
8) The point we’re trying to make here is this: recycling can be fun, and recycled products don’t have to look like that’s what they are [www.treehugger.com] -- they can be chic, sleek, and ready to propel you through the 21st century. To wit: everything pictured below is recycled; would you have guessed?