Recycle Your Waste, Grow a Garden and a Compost Bin

If your kitchen is like most, you have a lot of food waste that goes down your garbage disposal. Give your garbage disposal a little break and start your own compost pile. Compost piles are easy to do and you’ll benefit by healthier eating. There are many ready made compost bins available for purchase or you can build your own with some wood and some skills.

The bin is very basically a box with a lid on it where the lower section of the front of the box is hinged so you can dig compost out from the bottom. If you know anyone with grass eating animals, and chickens, a good way to add to your compost pile in levels is chicken waste and waste from grass eating animals. When you rake your yard of leaves, put the leaves in the bin too. Don’t put big branches in there because they won’t decompose fast enough. Add all of your food waste as you make it. Make sure the pieces are small so they can break down faster and don’t put grease in your compost pile.

You will do your compost pile a world of good if you purchase some work castings to put into the pile once it has begun to grow. In order for the items in the bin to decompose it will need to stay wet, don’t let your compost pile dry out. When you’re ready for compost remove it from the bottom and spread it around your plants. This is a wonderfully green way to fertilize your garden and also keep garbage from heading into the land fills.

Why Is It Important To Keep Our Trash Out Of The Ocean?

The ocean is so vast that you would believe you could throw a piece of trash in it and it would disappear forever. As a matter of fact, too many think that, and that coupled with trash getting into our drainage system has caused the ‘Great Pacific Garbage Patch’ which is also known as the Trash Vortex and possibly many other names.

This area is located in the North Pacific Gyre which is a clockwise swirl of currents that houses little more than phytoplankton and our garbage. In fact there is so much trash that it is estimated that there is six times more trash than there is plankton.  It is estimated that over twenty billion pounds of plastic trash finds its way from our hands to the ocean each and every year. Plastics are horrible for the ocean because they are toxic, they don’t biodegrade.

They break into smaller pieces that may disperse over a wide area, clogging gills of fish and other filter type feeders. Aquatic birds tend to ingest them and turtles who love the taste of jellyfish end up ingesting plastic bags as well. The ocean only looks big, even the vastness of the ocean can’t swallow up our garbage without a trace. Recycling these items saves the animals of the ocean and keeps it healthy for generations to come.

What Do I Do With My Old Prescription Glasses, After All, They’re Still Good

As we get older, our eyes change and as our eyes change, so do our prescriptions. This leaves us with perfectly good pairs of glasses that we no longer need. We may have literally paid hundreds of dollars for them, however they have become trash to us and they either just sit in a drawer or they may even go right into the trash.

Some places like Goodwill may take the glasses but they in all likelihood have more glasses than they know what to do with already and are not all that terribly interested in taking yours. So now what do you do? One thing that most people never consider is the different charity clubs such as Lions and Rotary.

Lions Club International has a program specifically for recycling old prescription glasses for children and adults alike. They work in partnership with readingglasses.com in order to distribute the glasses throughout the world. If you have a lot of old glasses, and the lenses are in good shape, these are the people you want to talk to. Even if the frames are not in good shape, they can take the good lenses and put them into useable frames and then redistribute them. This way your perfectly good glasses don’t end up sitting in a land fill for long after you and I both have left this world.

Recycling Old CD’s and CD Cases

In this age of computers, we seem to go through CDs and their cases on a constant basis, leaving us with old CDs that we don’t know what to do with. CDs are great at reflecting light and if woven between the spokes of a bike will provide a very unique way of letting people know you are in the area. Broken up into pieces CDs can be used just like broken tile in order to make some unique garden type furniture that reflect the colors of nature around them.

Need to tell people where the edge of the street is at night and don’t want to go spend a lot of money on stake reflectors? Take some of your CDs and attach them to a garden stake, when the vehicle headlights contact the surface of the CD, they will get a shining reminder as to just where the road edge is, and you won’t have to spend a lot of money in order to tell them.

We all need coasters in order to protect our tables. Attach some felt to the back of your unwanted CDs and you instantly have coasters for your drinks. For the big CD cases that come with a whole lot of CDs In each case, fill it up with some rich soil, plant some seeds and put the top back on, now you have a miniature greenhouse.

There are a multitude of uses for these unwanted items, Your only limitation is your imagination.