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Waste Electronic Recycling with Terracycle

Piles of E-Waste!

Have you ever wondered where all of our old computers and out dated electronics go? The shocking answer is usually that they go to a landfill but one company is making treasures out of e-trash and their waste electronic recycling is a wonderful thing! http://www.flickr.com/photos/zilpho/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 I have noticed a trend of [...]

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Inside the Recycling Process with EcoRewards

I was recently invited to take a tour of a local Texas recycling center which is operated by the AbitibiBowater’s Recycling Division. Casey Gray is a “Business Recycling Consultant” and he gave me an amazing tour of the AbitibiBowater recycling center in Arlington, Texas. The division that Casey operates the EcoRewards Recycling program and they [...]

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Worm Composting, Worms Go In, Compost Comes Out

Fall seemed the appropriate time to talk about worm composting. Worm composting is a way to recycle food waste into a rich, dark, earthy-smelling soil conditioner. This type of composting is somewhat unique in that it can be done indoors, as well as outdoors, this allows for all year composting. If you live in a [...]

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Jack O’Lantern Pumpkin Seeds Recycled!

pumpkin_seeds

Photo by: Momster Its almost Halloween and along with the season comes the carving of the pumpkin.  The pumpkin carving ritual isn’t complete until you have cleaned out all those seeds. Here is a great idea, recycle and reuse them, by roasting them in the oven. Roasted pumpkin seeds are packed with nutrition and low in [...]

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Soap Nuts

If you are anything like alot of people, you have probably never heard of soap nuts. I know I hadn’t, until this article I read the other day. Soap nuts, also called soapberries, washing nuts, or Ritha/Reetha (in Hindi), contain “saponins”, which have the ability to clean and wash. When in contact with water, it [...]

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Creative Homemade Halloween Potions!

Our Green Halloween Potions

Halloween is almost here and we have been trying to find creative ways to green our Halloween! Have you got lots of old spotlight bulbs ready to be recycled? We replaced all of our old incandescent spotlights with Compact Flourescents and had a cupboard full of old burned out spotlight bulbs… But what could we [...]

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Fall goes Green

Going Green in the Fall

Fall has arrived here in Texas. The cooler weather makes me think about the holidays and decorating. There are so may ways you can dress up your house for fall, Harvest parties and the holidays in a eco-friendly way. Here are just a few ideas ideas, if you have others, let me know. Table fashions: [...]

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Top 10 Green Halloween Costumes!

It’s almost time for the ghosts and ghouls to haunt our streets again so we put together the Our Everyday Earth top ten list of green Halloween costumes! These spooky Halloween “get-ups” either spread an eco friendly message or are made from recycled materials; #10: Captain Recycle! We loved this idea, he’s a mean green [...]

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McKinney Recycling Center Opens in Texas

A brand new recycling center has just opened in McKinney, Texas and it promises to revolutionize recycling in the local area. The IESI McKinney recycling facility is called a Material Recovery Facility and is situated in McKinney near the Collin Airport. The Mckinney recycling facility will be the first privately funded single-stream LEED certified Material [...]

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Reversing Energy Loss

Did you know that a whopping 46 percent of home energy use is actually energy loss! In other words, there is no productive energy use at all! Here are 10 simple ways of reversing this energy lose, by changing some old habit and starting some new ones! Check out this list, these are some very [...]

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What We Give up, the Planet Gains

During the past months, there is no doubt that times have been tough, for many it has been, and continues to be a very difficult road. Forced or involuntary simplicity is seldom fun, but can be good for the soul. People tend to think that Simplicity is simple — that it means easy — But [...]

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Texas Landfill Uses Old Tires

Out for a walk the other day, I noticed a couple of old automobile tires leaning against the trash bins at a business. That got me to wondering, what do they do with all those tires? Apparently, discarded tires have long been considered a landfill pest. These tires are often under-recycled. They cannot be land-filled [...]

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Paper Energy and Recycled Material

I was just surfing on the net looking for random facts about the 3-R’s, (recycle, reuse, reduce), when I came across some information that I found to be amazing, at least to me. 1 ton of un-coated virgin (non-recycled) printing and office paper uses 24 trees 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 [...]

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Shopping Totes-Reuseable

We have been using reusable shopping bags since February of this year. It is amazing how few plastic bags we now have that we have to recycle. We use to get aroung 10 to 15 plastic bags a week, from our trips to the grocery store, drug store, shopping center etc. Now that we use [...]

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A Greener Home Office

Working from home gives me the opportunity to run a green office. I went to Staples to get paper the other day and took stock of all the recycled products I could get. I have been buying Staples 100% recycled copy paper for a while. It is 20lb, 90 bright, made from 100% recycled paper [...]

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Always Something to Learn When Your Eyes Are Opened

How does a project that seems so simple and gratifying, end up making you feel guilty when your done? Well, when you start becoming environmentally conscious about what you do, then sometimes the end result can give you a different ending, as in my story. It has opened my eyes and given me yet another [...]

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Going Bananas

I couldn’t believe it, I walked outside to take the dogs out and there was something different about my banana trees, well one of them. It had a bloom on it. A really big bloom! This is the second year for this plant in our side-yard. I did not know that they produced fruit so [...]

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Let’s Talk Recycled Construction Products!

REBAR: A rod or bar used for reinforcement in concrete or asphalt pours. This bar is used for many other things as well. They’ve been used for Pavilions, stakes for vining plants, set up like a tee pee and string lights on them and they look like Christmas trees, art work and many other things. [...]

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Drinking Water Bottles, One Small Step

If you subscribe to the Native American Proverb that “We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children”, then we have no excuse not to do something to help our earth and the environment we live in. Our group here in Texas is  made up of 6 different families [...]

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Types of Plastic Packaging Symbols – A Quick Guide

Have you ever wondered what the numbers inside the little recycling symbol mean on all of the plastic packaging and plastic products that we use? The symbols are known as “resin codes” and were established by the SPI – The Plastics Industry Trade Association (www.plasticsindustry.org) in 1988 responding to the requests of the many recyclers [...]

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