Join Me in Pledging to Recycle for America Recycles Day

Next week, we’ll be celebrating one of the best and least-known patriotic celebrations, America Recycles Day! America Recycles Day is the only nationally recognized day and coast-to-coast community-driven awareness campaign dedicated to promoting and celebrating recycling in the United States. It has been held on – and in the weeks leading into – Nov. 15 since 1997. With it and other pushes to recycle we have increased our national recycling rate from 7% in 1960 to 34.5% today.

We celebrate America Recycles Day because it helps everyone band together to teach what actually goes into recycling bins and why people should still care about recycling. Dalton’s current recycling rate hovers around 10% through curbside recycling and our convenience centers so America Recycles Day is one of our most needed holidays to remind us to keep aiming higher. Celebrating America Recycles Day right before Thanksgiving, Black Friday, and Christmas also helps remind us to be mindful of our waste before we create it, not just after.

Our national recycling rate is 34.5% annually which means that 174 billion pounds of material is able to be used again instead of being stored in a landfill. The items you recycle can be turned into several new household items. Your milk bottle can become an outdoor park bench, your cereal box can become a board game, your plastic water bottle can become a new pair of jeans and these are only some of the limitless options for your properly sorted recyclables.

It can be expensive to landfill items. The cost of only the construction of each new cell (which is about 13 to 15 acres) of a landfill is about $5 million. This is largely due to the measures that have to be taken to get rid of the leachate (or garbage-juice) so it can be treated as industrial waste water and to build in defenses that protect the environment around the landfill. Once inside the landfill, the trash is “mummified” meaning that it will have to be monitored for decades and no trees or building can be placed on top of any section of a landfill. By recycling, we bypass that process and get major environmental benefits out of our time, money, and waste.

While the price paid for recyclables had gone down significantly leading to massive changes in the American markets, it is still a multi-billion-dollar industry that employs millions of Americans. Commercial and municipal recycling represents nearly $106 billion in economic activity annually. If you throw those items away instead of recycling, you lose $11 billion dollars that could go back into investing in America.  The Environmental Protection Agency found that every 10,000 tons of materials recycled supports nearly 16 jobs and $760,000 in wages.

America Recycles Day’s call-to-action, “#BeRecycled,” is an invitation to individuals to actively live a recycled lifestyle. We encourage everyone to commit to the “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” mantra in every aspect of their lives.

At its core, this means recycling at home, at work and on-the-go.  However, it doesn’t have to stop there. There are a number of products that are made from recycled content – so make a pledge recycle and to buy items with recycled content. 

Each of us can be part of the solution by being more mindful of how to properly recycle the products we use. Go to americarecyclesday.org to take the pledge and join in with local schools such as Southeast High School and companies such as Mohawk who will be taking the pledge with us on November 15th.

After taking the pledge to #BeRecycled visit www.dwswa.org to learn about recycling options in Whitfield County and the city of Dalton. Choose the Recycling 101 page or the educational resources available to local schools or give me a call and we can talk all about it.

If you would like to help teach your younger kids about reducing waste bring them to the Dalton-Whitfield County Regional Public Library on November 12th at 5:00 p.m. for Storytime. We’ll be learning all about compost and reducing our waste with a fun craft and stories.