Bring clean, dry pots and trays to the shelf located in the outdoor gardening section near the checkout. Take a tray to reuse to bring home your purchased plants!
After you have added those new plants to your yard and garden, what do you do with all the leftover plastic pots? The Home Depot on Baltimore Pike in Primose/Secane has a collection for used flower pots and plant trays for reuse and recycling.
Bring clean, dry pots and trays to the shelf located in the outdoor gardening section near the checkout. Take a tray to reuse to bring home your purchased plants! More and more candidates are designing lawn signs so that they can be reused for subsequent campaigns. Consider saving signs without election dates on them to reuse when your favorite candidate runs again. Unfortunately, campaign signs are tough to recycle. Those made of plastic sheeting are akin to single-use plastic bags and do NOT belong in the recycling bin. You may be able to take them to grocery stores that recycle bags. Metal brackets are considered scrap metal and also do NOT belong in the recycling bin. You can take them to a scrap metal dealer, such as Accurate Metals, in Lansdowne. Another option: reuse the brackets as supports in the garden. photo by Susan O'Donnell With the Covid-19 pandemic has come a surge in use of single-use plastic bags. Grocery deliveries may leave you swimming in bags, and some stores don’t allow customers to use bags brought from home. If you are unable to avoid collecting lots of plastic bags, be sure to recycle them. Most grocery stores have a bin to collect clean, dry plastic bags for recycling. When you feel safe enough to return to in-person shopping, take advantage of this recycling opportunity and drop off your collection of plastic bags. When shopping at a store that does not allow bags from home, try these alternatives:
photo by Susan O'Donnell Recycling rule of thumb: Don’t put anything smaller than a credit card in your recycling bin. Due to the way curbside recycling is sorted, items smaller than a credit card cannot be sorted properly and interfere with sorting machinery. So, to improve recycling efficiency, keep smaller pieces of paper and plastic out of the single stream recycling. This includes items such as shredded paper and loose plastic bottle caps. Smaller pieces of paper, shredded paper, and cardboard can be recycled at the Swarthmore Recycling Center at 121 Dartmouth Ave. How sustainable is your toilet paper? In a report entitled “The Issue with Tissue: How Americans Are flushing Forests Down the Toilet”, the Natural Resources Defense Council states that most toilet paper, paper towels and facial tissues sold in the United States are made from wood pulp, “and in the United States that wood pulp comes largely from the boreal forest of Canada. Our demand for tissue is devastating the boreal, with serious consequences for Indigenous Peoples, treasured wildlife, and the global climate.”* The report provides a consumer guide to individual brands of tissue products, graded on the basis of recycled content. NRDC calls on companies to “stop the tree-to-toilet pipeline” by transitioning to postconsumer recycled fibers. Consumers can limit or reduce their use of disposable tissue products by, for example, using cloth napkins and kitchen towels. *Jennifer Skene. February, 2019. "The Issue with Tissue: How Americans Are flushing Forests Down the Toilet." NRDC Report https://www.nrdc.org/sites/default/files/issue-tissue-how-americans-are-flushing-forests-down-toilet-report.pdf Photo by Daniela, Flickr Commons Lightly rinse recyclables with cold water to reduce contamination of other recyclable material. For more details, see this article by Nick Douglas at Lifehacker.com. https://lifehacker.com/how-to-rinse-your-recyclables-without-wasting-water-1826764672 When buying beverages, choose those in aluminum cans rather than glass for more efficient recycling. As you prepare to entertain or determine your menu for the holidays, consider the recycling potential of the packaging for the products that you buy. Although glass is a great resource for containers, it is no longer as easily recycled. Because of its weight, glass is heavy for haulers, increasing recycling costs for haulers and municipalities. Glass also has few uses as a recycled material. Aluminum is valuable as a recycled material. It is lightweight, and municipalities and haulers can actually make money back from recycling plants. You can recycle cans curbside or bring them directly to the Swarthmore Recycling Center where the Borough of Swarthmore will get money back, helping to reduce the overall cost of recycling. The Recycling Center is located at 121 Dartmouth Avenue and is open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. So when you have a choice between aluminum cans and glass bottles for your drinks, choose cans, and be sure to recycle them when you are done. Photo by Ty Nigh, Flickr Commons The newest recycling guidelines recommend keeping lids on plastic bottles. Swarthmore’s recycling handler, Republic Services, requests that lids be kept on plastic food and liquid containers; caps cannot be recycled separately. Alternatively, caps can be donated to schools for reuse in art projects. Here is information from the Association for Plastic Recyclers website: --https://www.plasticsrecycling.org/education/faqs/caps-on --https://recyclingsimplified.com/ --https://www.swarthmorepa.org/DocumentCenter/View/837/Recyclables-Collateral-2 Photo by M. Cantu from Flickr Commons
Make the most of your recyclables: take your paper, cardboard, and aluminum cans to the Recycling Center at 121 Dartmouth Ave. in Swarthmore. Paper, cardboard, and aluminum are the most valuable recyclable materials. While the cost of hauling and recycling other materials is sharply rising, Swarthmore gets a return on paper, cardboard, and aluminum, but only when separated and brought to the Recycling Center. Bringing your paper, cardboard, and aluminum to Swarthmore’s Recycling Center assures that your recyclables will be successfully recycled and reduces the overall cost to the Borough. See additional information about recycling clothing in this green tip. From Swarthmore Borough Facebook: Swarthmore residents should be justifiably proud of the rate at which they recycle, with more than 35% of the Borough’s solid waste diverted from the trash stream. However, recent changes in the worldwide recycling market have made those overflowing blue bins of mixed recycling materials of limited value. In fact, they are costing the Borough and its contracted recycling team thousands of dollars annually and may be ending up in the trash instead of being recycled at all. Is there anything I can do? Recycled material is most valuable when it is separated before being recycled. It is likely that the Borough will change its curbside program in the near future to separate materials to the greatest extent feasible. However, in the meantime, we are encouraging residents to utilize the Borough’s Recycling Center, which is already set up for source separated material. The Recycling Center is located at 121 Dartmouth Avenue and is open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 8 p.m. on weekends. The Recycling Center is located in a residential neighborhood. Please be courteous and adhere to the posted hours! What specifically should I be taking to the Recycling Center? Paper and Cardboard If it tears, bring it to the dumpster at the Recycling Center! A complete list of acceptable materials can be found on the stairs leading up to the dumpster. These include office paper, newspaper, window envelopes, books, magazines, pizza boxes (remove any leftover pizza and/or wax paper) and shredded paper (please put in a paper bag to keep it from blowing around). Cardboard should be flattened and any plastic or Styrofoam packing material should be removed. This material is sold to Newman Paper Company in Philadelphia and used to make a variety of paperboard products. Aluminum The green trailer at the Recycling Center is for aluminum only, which continues to be a valuable commodity for recycling. The Borough Public Works Department keeps track of the local market for aluminum and takes the collected material to whichever marketer is paying the highest price. I can’t make it to the Recycling Center. Will you still take paper and aluminum with my other recyclables? Yes, all commingled material will still be collected every week curbside until further notice. Recycle your old working fridge or freezer and get a $75 rebate and free pickup from PECO.
Old refrigerators and freezers can consume as much as four times more energy than newer models and could be costing you up to $150 a year in electricity. Let PECO recycle your old, working fridge or freezer, and they'll pay you a rebate. Schedule a pick up at peco.com. Get $75 PECO will pick up your old, working fridge or freezer, recycle it and send you $75. Plus get another $10 for recycling a working room air conditioner at the same time. To schedule an appointment, be sure you have your electric bill account number handy. To look up your bill account number, go to peco.com. Also, you will need the make, model and size of the unit, which must be between 10 and 30 cubic feet and working at the time of pickup. Offer Details
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