at home we recycle paper, plastic, glass, cans, etc.. and for a while we had a compost heap that we put like veggie scraps and egg shells in

my dad is makin a new compost heap so we should do that again

edit: At home we can only recycle plastic #1 & #2 so #3 thru like #8 cant be recycled.

It varies alot. I was getting ~C$100/tonne for corragated last fall in BC.

maybe 2%

0%

If only there were recycling facilities at our apartments, and we have no car to drive to one.. We'd like to recycle, heh.

I don't know an exact percentage, but I recycle all my cans and plastics. I need to find somewhere to actually recycle them though, I have a couple sacks just sitting in my closet...

We recycle everything we can, inclduing cardboard, newspapers, normal paper, glass, aluminum, and other stuff I'm forgetting. We also compost, though I think its pretty nasty and wouldn't do it myself (bin behind the house holds all the rotting food matter and turns it into dirt). We have a bigass rolling bin and then tons of little square boxes to put the recyclables into for disposal every Wednesday, so it makes it really easy and I don't know why people wouldn't bother recycling their stuff, though I understand that other communities you actually have to take all the crap to the recycling center yourself, which seems like a lot of work to me unless you have a trailer or something and could do it once or twice a year.

Thanks everyone for responding. I've recently become a landlord and was SHOCKED at the cost of garbage removal. They don't charge to pick up recycling here. Based on many of your comments, it sounds like if I set up good recycling bins for the tenants, some of them will likely use them, saving me $$$. That'd be a good thing.

The newspaper subscription is ending soon and I don't think I'm gonna renew (too many days go straight from the front porch to the recycling bin), so I'll see what my real % is.

We recycle all of our cans all of the time, and occasionally papers when we think to do it. Other than that, not much is goin' on in my family's household to save Mother Earth.

probably 90% or more of our waste is recyclable here.

we have a HUGE bin for recyclables & a tiny bin for the pure garage (oxymoron), which we rarely even half fill.
all of out yard debris is put out on the street & scooped away by big catepiller things.

I'd say 50% at least.

Recycle all plastics, milk containers, bottles, newspaper, and pretty much anything that we can. The biodegradable food scraps go into the compost in the garden.

0%

Most recycling uses more resources than just making new stuff.

I'd say 20-30 percent. mostly the big things like glass bottles, cans, plastic bottles.

I'd say about 50%!!

Its our City Ordinance to Recycle. We're paying for it, so it makes sense to actually do it. Not that I don't mind it. I just wish they'd accept more than what they do now. There are some numbers they don't accept. :( I have noticed that my family only puts out about one trash can a week now... we have 2... as we used to use two... :)

When I am in Ottawa it's 50% or greater - including paper, plastic, organic.

In Montreal it's 0% :( because the apartment complex I am at is just too small to have the bins laying around. I talked to the Super and he said that they did have a recycling station set up before, but people were just throwing anything into it - makeing it a pain in the ass to sort out.

0% and damn proud of it.

This is not a rant about why you should recycle, but I feel compelled to offer a little background information, based on my experience.

I work for a company that makes the equipment used in large recycling facilities and I can tell you that we are struggling to keep up with the demand for new equipment. As more goverments mandate diversion of solid waste, more and more facilities are being built to handle the load. Here in California, the most populous counties have target percentages of material that they must divert from the waste stream, or face stiff penalties. And those percentages are constantly increasing.
The current trend in recycling is called "Single Stream" which means you put all your recyclables in one container rather than separating them at the curb. This accomplishes two things. First, it makes it easy to do, which means more people will actually do it, and help the community reach its goals. Second, it saves a lot of money for the haulers. It's much more efficient than using segregated trucks, which have to return whenever one of the compartments is full.
But the various materials have to be separated, or it's just garbage. That's where our equipment comes in. We make machines that separate cardboard from paper, paper from containers, aluminum from plastic etc.
Now, an average facility can process 20 tons of material per hour or more. In one year, that equals over 80 million pounds of material that doesn't go into a landfill or an incinerator. That's just one facility in one medium sized community. There are hundreds across the country, and more being built. That also doesn't include the many tons of beverage containers processed by refund centers.

Never mind the trees that don't have to be cut down, the aluminum and tin that do not have to be mined, or the oil used for making plastics. At the very least, recycling will help keep us from one day finding ourselves buried under a coast-to-coast mountain of garbage.

And, to honor the thread topic, I recycle all my beverage containers. I take everthing to a refund center. I also live in an apartment that doesn't have recycling, so I try to sometimes haul my paper or other containers to the bins we have here at work.

other than giving my cans to the local animal shelter....NOT A DAMN THING!

maybe sumthin´like 35 - 50% average. sometimes i´m too lazy to carry many garbage bags , (i´ll put everything in one 150L plastic bag,) and i´ll dumb them all in one. not so friendly, but that´s how it is.

0%

Zero. Exactly zero.

On a street where there is an average of 3 bags of trash per house, and some as high a 7 for their weekly trash pick up, my house has the least. 1 bag of trash per week. Everything else is recycled.

We do maybe 30%, but that's a rough guess. We recycle plastic, glass, cans, paper and cardboard.

The local news aired some home video footage, that someone had sent them, of the local trash haulers just dumping the recycle bins in the back of the trucks with the rest of the trash. Now, I'm not washing this stuff out, just to have it end up in the landfill with the rest of the trash. But, my wife is pretty adament about recycling...so I keep washing out the bottles and cans.

Antagony and I consume enough Caffeine enhanced carbonated beverages to equal a football team, yet unless he is doing it behind my back, we don't recycle anything, sadly.

i probably recycle about half of my garbage. i used to recycle almost 90% of my garbage at my last apartment because they had comingled recycling bins. they don't have those where i live now, and they don't take as much stuff as my last place. it's kind of unfortunate i think.

I don't know how much I recycle but I do know that I take 2 cans to the dump once every 5-6 weeks. Not too bad for a fambly of 5.

0% because I'm a bastard.

I am new to where I live and don't know of a single fucking place to take it.

On the up side, bums always go through our trash so I know at least my soda cans are getting recycled. :)

save the planet 2k3
 

all bottles, cans, papers. other than that what else can i recycle. oh yeah plastic, i burn that hahahahaha!!!!!

I just recycle my soda cans, which make up very little of my trash. Probably 2%, tops.

As if one person can make a change

Cans, bottles, plastic, paper. I'll bet it works out to about 50% of the bulk and 70% of the weight.

Thanks for listening.

0 - 1 %

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Sleepyjack
Does anyone else have a compost as well?QUOTE]


I do, but it's in my backyard, on the edge of the "lawn" and a foresty greenbelt that goes back to a salmon spawning stream. I put all sorts of stuff back there in this huge pile, but I'm always afraid to put scraps of anything that resembles meat. This is because I have cats, and the last thing I want to do is attract coyotes or anything to my yard. Sometimes it's funny, because I tend to eat bananas for breakfast, and all the peels go out there. Well during times when I don't have a lot to through out there, it gets covered and looks like a giant yellow graveyard.

What are you talking about? Have you no idea of nuclear waste? And how it can not be disposed of properly and how it accumulates by the tons? If that's better I don't want to be any part of it.