Don't just recycle - precycle

How to precycle

Recycling is a wonderful, eco-friendly activity. You can improve your green efforts by incorporating precycling into your recycling repertoire. What is precycling, you ask?

When you precycle, you plan your buying activities in advance, with a target of reducing waste. What a wonderful and simple idea! As you are aware, packaging is a major percentage of the total trash volume deposited in landfills. Depending on your locale, discarded packaging may amount to 50% or more of the trash volume. Good for the packaging manufacturers, but terrible for our environment.

The fact is that much of this packaging in not only wasted, it's not even biodegradable. Most plastic packaging is recyclable but not biodegradable. It will live in our landfills forever. When your trash outlives your body, we have a problem.

Precycling gives you the opportunity to plan your purchases to reduce future waste products and to generate as much benefit to the environment as possible. You needn't lose sleep over designing these plans. Just use your common sense and save yourself some time when deciding how to reduce and recycle your waste products. Below are some suggestions for using a precycle mentality.

Suggestions for effective precycling

Purchase bulk products

Purchase bulk products instead of individually wrapped items. Eliminating individual wrapping helps ease your recycling efforts afterward. You don't have to package, allocate, carry, and dispose of or recycle packaging you don't have. Another welcome benefit you'll receive is saving money. Typically, buying things in bulk results in lower cost. Much of this cost reduction is exactly because of the lack of extra packaging materials, which you didn't want anyway.

Get your news online

Plan to read your favorite newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals online, eliminating the need for subscriptions for paper issues . Precycling your reading preferences reduces the need for deforestation and paper production, and it saves you the time and aggravation of having to carry these things to your recycle bin.

Limit use of disposables

Plan to limit the use of paper plates and cups along with plastic silverware . You would be unpleasantly surprised if you added up your annual cost of paper or plastic dinnerware – these are dollars from your bank account. Plus, you have to take into account the physical necessity of putting them in the proper bin. Then, consider the cost of recycling these products, since they can't be reused as they are. You should use normal dinnerware and silverware whenever possible to eliminate the need for disposal or recycling. The only harm you can do to your environment while using these is using up water when washing them.

Use cloth napkins

Whenever possible, use cloth napkins along with your regular dinnerware. Napkins have their own category since many people who are conscientious about recycling dinnerware are often more careless with napkins. While this is just another habit that can be changed, massive amounts of this paper are routinely deposited in the regular trash. Cloth napkins are much nicer, anyway.

Rethink your cleaning supplies

Plan to use the least hazardous cleaning products with the least packaging. Along with helping the environment, you'll reduce waste and recycling efforts.

Rid your house of mercury

Plan to reduce (eliminate if possible) the mercury in your home. As you may know, mercury is a toxic and dangerous substance. Unfortunately, mercury is often used in many household products, including in thermostats, steam irons with auto shutoff features, fever and meat thermometers, and silent wall switches. Precycle these items by planning to replace them with similar products that don't use mercury. Also, remember it is illegal to throw out mercury in your trash. Look for the closest household hazardous waste facility to dispose of these items.

Plan ahead

Using these suggestions will probably generate even more ideas for precycling to reduce your "workload" and the time and effort for being a conscientious recycler. You'll feel great, your environment will thank you, and you will offer your friends, neighbors, and family a wonderful role model for going green.

Just as proper planning in business and personal situations usually generates better results, precycling accomplishes the same goal.

While recycling is a wonderful and helpful habit to develop, precycling is an equally beneficial activity – and it typically saves you money and extra recycling efforts.