Eco Finds
FRIDAY
01.27.2012

Regional Recycling: a Step Towards Zero Waste

by / kihada Share this post /

zero_waste_challenge_beautiful_girl Have you heard about the Zero Waste Challenge? It’s Metro Vancouver’s campaign to help move our region towards drastic waste reduction as part of their new solid waste plan. Zero waste – that’s hard to imagine. How can we possibly carry out our active everyday lives without producing any refuse at all? Just think – the cereal we eat for breakfast comes in a plastic-lined box, the milk a carton, the banana a peel; the printer we use at work gets ink from a disposable cartridge and the staffroom coffee maker leaves a heap of soiled grinds after every pot; our favourite beverages all come in boxes, cans, bottles, or paper cups; our lights burn out and our batteries run dry, and our many beloved appliances won’t last forever.

Luckily, all of those examples can have a happily recycled ending. Thanks to companies like Regional Recycling, more than half of the 3.6 million tonnes of waste we create each year is kept out of the garbage. The one stop recycling shop has five locations across the lower mainland dedicated to making Earth Day everyday. It also offers a variety of commercial recycling programs and recycling services, including free pick-ups for bottle drives, school programs, commercial pick-up, and electronics pick-up.

The hope is that by 2015, a minimum of 70% of our waste will be re-used or recycled instead of landing in disposals. Can we do it? Consider this: Regional Recycling will happily take – and in some cases, refund your deposits on – items like the milk carton and cardboard box from breakfast, the empty printer cartridge and any scrap paper from work, those numerous cans and bottles that once contained favourite thirst-quenchers, and almost every kind of electronic device that has passed on to the appliance afterlife. That old milk frother that no longer glams up your lattes? They’ll take it. The out of date VCR and cheese brick cell phone? They’ll take ‘em. The toaster oven, rotating fan, dehydrator, hair dryer, vacuum cleaner canister, electric toothbrush, lithium and alkaline batteries, barbecue, and love-hate bathroom scales? Bring ‘em down and keep them out of the sprawling landfills that are destined to overwhelm our precious planet. The Burnaby, Abbotsford, and Richmond locations will even pay you for that non-ferrous scrap metal you’ve been holding on to for no apparent reason.

Check out Regional Recycling online for more extensive lists of acceptable items – surely they make up more than 70% of what you use everyday! Bit by bit, they’re cleaning up our city by making us rethink what we’re throwing away. Understanding the breadth of our recycling capacities has already helped us here at Kihada green up our business, and we know it can do the same for you. Keep an eye out for more recycling tips and discoveries from Kihada, and remember that the best solutions – even the green solutions – are the kreative ones.

ZERO WASTE CHALLENGE