Making items from recycled materials serves two purposes.

Firstly, there is the recycling value where old pieces of fabric, plastic bottles and clothing are reused and secondly there are new items made, in this case, jewelery cases by Aster and Sage Elizabeth Jewellery.

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Features:

Perfect jewellery envelope

Measures 5″ x 5.5″

Zippered main compartment

Interior pocket to keep jewellery separate

Button flap conceals felt panels for securing pins and earrings

Cotton lining

Colours available: Apple green, Scarlet red, Sapphire blue

Price $33.00

Source [The Green Loop]

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Well, if you haven’t, first of all, there is one. If you have heard of it, you are a solid all around eco aware individual. Kudos to you!

I don’t recall if i have heard of the CD Recycling Center Of America before, there is too much info floating around in my head. But if not, i just discovered it on the TechSoup.org blog. Which by the way has a super cool article on What To Do With Old CD’s and DVD’s.

The CD Recycling Center of America is based in Salem, North Hampshire and accepts CD’s of different sizes and shapes, instructions on what, where, when, and how are found on their website. It is important that you read their guidelines first, before sending anything their way. Recycle, Reduce, and Reuse.

If you live in a small town like me, then you already know it can be quite difficult to recycle. The resources for mass use are simply not in place. In my small town the closest recycler is almost 50 miles away. Yikes!

(the bins above NOT available in most small towns)

I believe this distance pretty much cancels out the environmental benefits of recycling. If one has to drive 45 minutes (or worse) to recycle doesn’t this invalidate the effort? Small towns really get the short shaft when it comes to recycling resources. Whereas bigger cities and towns such as Chicago (my hometown) residents are provided with blue bins for easy recycling and nearby recycling centers abound.

However there are things we small town folks can do to somewhat alleviate this recycling problem. We can still apply the other two R’s, Re-use and Reduce. Below is a list of things i re-use.

Things I Re-Use:

• Milk Containers (re-used as plant containers)
• Paper (use back side, cut into small squares and use as note paper, etc)
• Any and all Plastic Bags
• Pringles Cans (use as coin holders for the kids)
• Composting (the re-use of certain food products for outside soil)
• Old Tee’s (re-used as rags)
• list goes on and one

Another pet peeve of mine, if you will indulge me abit, is consumer packaging. It is completely out of control, i am amazed at times, at the sheer waste in certain procut packages. For example, my roommate likes to munch at KFC (nazi-chicken killers, if you ask me, explanation = i’m a vegetarian) and their packaging is insane. You get gobs of GIANT plastic containers for small food pieces, it is a ridiculous amount of waste. They could easily streamline this up and go with much smaller containers, and sans lids. Improved packaging alone would help SMALL TOWN RESIDENTS who may (or may not) be able to recycle, to curb waste locally.

Let me get back to my post. I see i went off on a tiny tangent there. I reuse alot of items and essentially re-purpose many of them.

Re-ducing and Re-using are but two ways small town residents can turn a negative into a positive. The negative being not many options for in town recycling, and easier access to recycling resources. I would like to open this topic up to you, with a reader question.

Reader Question

If you live in a small town, how do you practice the three R’s - recycle, reuse or reduce?

To help reduce plastic bag use, Ikea, is promoting the use of their Big Blue Bag, which they have recently reduced the price of to just .59 cents. The reason they are in favor of this measure is because “the amount of plastic shopping bags that we all use once and toss is overwhelming” and they cite some statistics like that “the average family of 4 accumulates 1,460 plastic shopping bags a year” and that “100 billion are given away each year in the US”.  Those are some wicked wild numbers and we need to ACT.

Did you know?
“It can take up to 1000 years for a plastic bag to break down in the environment”

Something as simple as declining plastic bags at grocery stores and malls is one quick and easy thing we can do now that will make a big difference later.
Their motto is reduce, reuse, and recycle. I love ikea, i have always been a big fan of their euro home furnishings and accessories, and their prices are nice and tight. I’m glad to see them going green.

They have several locations throughout the nation, you can find your local one on their site.

When I was in grade 11, I had to make a mousetrap car for Physics class. For the wheels, I used four CDs. I came second too! The team who won used weight bearings. Cheaters.

However, this great website Recycling CDs shows a new way you can recycle your CDs and DVDs when you are done with them (thanks to iPods!) or have scratched them and ruined them forever. CD clocks! They have a form you can fill out, and they’ll take your CDs from you.

Or if you don’t have any CDs (thanks to iPods!) Check out their wide selection of CD and DVD clocks to choose from. And, if you don’t like any of their designs, you can create your own!

Each clock is approximately $11.93. Check them out here!