America Recycles Day | Sierra Star

Did you know that Americans produce roughly 4.4 pounds of trash per person each day? For a family of four, that’s 6,400 pounds of trash per year!. Where does your trash go? Do you recycle? What do you recycle? Could you recycle more?

America Recycles Day is Nov. 15. The campaign was launched by Keep America Beautiful in partnership with the Ad Council to motivate Americans to recycle more. Find activities related to America Recycles Day at americarecyclesday.org and get details about the following: Recycling Selfie Sweepstakes: Snap a ‘‘selfies’’ while recycling any time before Nov. 20. Share it using #RecyclingSelfie for a chance to receive a prize. (Ten prizes will be awarded to random sweepstakes winners.)

Play the Super Sorter Game and see how your garbage gets another life at Iwanttoberecycled.org. Discover links to ‘‘Recycling Is No Joke’’ video competition entries, and be prepared to laugh. Take the pledge: individuals or businesses who take the pledge to recycle more will be entered to win a park bench made out of recycled plastic. Businesses can check out the link to Recyclingatwork.org for an action plan, tools, benefits, and case studies. Businesses taking the pledge get special discounts on recycling bins.

Here’s an interesting tidbit: After aluminum cans are sorted, cleaned and processed, aluminum shreds are fed into a furnace where they become molten metal and poured into a mold. It takes 1.5 million aluminum cans to make one ‘‘brick’’ or ‘‘ingot’’ of aluminum weighing 36,000 pounds (about the weight of four elephants). To make new cans, the brick is heated just enough so that it can be rolled into a coil approximately nine miles in length; new aluminum cans are manufactured from this coil.

You may be thinking, ‘‘Recycling takes time and effort, why should I bother?’’ Whether we see it directly or not, recycling benefits the health of our planet. It conserves earth’s natural resources, conserves energy (products produced from raw materials require more energy to make), and minimizes the amount of materials going into landfills. In addition to recycling all that we can, we must dispose of certain items (such as needles, tires, and batteries) in a responsible and legal manner. The efforts we make today will benefit not only ourselves, but our planet and future generations too.

Remember, you can take your recyclables (aluminum, corrugated cardboard, glass containers, mixed waste paper, newspapers, plastics, tin cans, scrap metal, and electronic waste) to the North Fork Transfer Station for free. Be sure your load is properly covered or secured to prevent loose trash from escaping onto our roadways. Hours of the transfer station: Thursday - Monday, 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., closed holidays. Other local resources for recycling can be found in the telephone book and at earth911.com.

Written by Sandee Scott and submitted by KOMB (Keep Our Mountains Beautiful). Details: komb4emc@gmail.com, or Scott, (559) 760-1058.