One of the challenges of being a green citizen is finding places that will take the goods you so desperately want to recycle. Often times it’s harder than it ought to be to do the right thing.
Fortunately there’s Earth911, a site that helps you locate recycling centers in your area (they have a national database of over 110,000 locations) and offers great resources on how best to reduce, reuse and recycle.
Using the clean, simple search interface you enter the specific item you want to recycle (car batteries, say, or mercury thermostats) and your location (by zip code or city). When you click on a specific locale in the results listing you’re given contact info, a map and a more details (what other items they take, whether they pick-up, what kind of condition an item must be in, etc.).
We searched for a place that would accept our recently retired inkjet printer—a notoriously difficult-to-recycle item—and found a dozen places within two miles of our office.
And those worried about their carbon footprints as we enter the month of merriment should check out their “Green Your Holidays” primer, complete with a gift guide and their take on the much-discussed artificial versus real Christmas tree debate.