December 2008
After the litter clean-ups, we usually leave the big Adopt-A-Highway bags full of recyclables by the curb next to our trash and one of the neighborhood recyclers comes by and picks up the bags. The last two weeks, nobody took the recyclables (too cold? ill? moved?). We had almost five Adopt-A-Highway bags full.I decided to recycle the stuff myself. The recycling center requires the items to be pre-sorted into three categories -- plastic, glass, and aluminum -- which I did.
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HALF a bag of glass bottles
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ONE bag of aluminum cans | Almost THREE BAGS of plastic bottles | ||
STATISTICS FROM THE RECYCLING CENTER |
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| 14 pounds of glass = $1.08 | 7.5 pounds of aluminum cans = $16.35 | 31 pounds of plastic = $3.41 | ||
That's a total of $20.86 for our efforts! You can see that aluminum is king in the recycling world, which is why recyclers spend their time picking up cans and not bottles.