@Tachyon: You've got some good points, although I would question whether recycling paper emits more greenhouse gas than using plantation or old growth forest wood. I've seen various figures, and I guess it depends where you live, but most of the numbers seem to be in favour of recycling paper if you want to lower co2.

However, recycling paper generally is of quite low priority in terms of greenhouse gases.

I recently did an amateur audit of my office's energy use and found that whatever the case, recycling paper is one of the least effective things you can do around the office... not to say that it isn't a little bit effective.

Using various rough figures that I could locate I managed to cut about 40 tonnes of co2 per year emitted by our office of 30 people. I like to think this is pretty good - you can try and save every last watt at home, but meanwhile there's about 2 or 3 whole people's worth of co2 just being wasted at your office. I highly recommend that everyone donate a few hours time at their offices to reducing co2 emissions. You can do so without getting in anyone's way... I don't think most people even noticed that I had cut back energy use so much.

Some of the savings that I found at our office were:
1) Air con (10-15 tonnes co2 saved per year)
2) Lighting (5-10 tonnes co2 saved per year)
3) Computing (5-6 tonnes co2 saved per year)

Meanwhile, recycling only presented opportunity for about 700kg of co2 in savings.

Obviously REUSE is much more effective than recycling... or even better, DON'T USE (just don't buy stuff in the first place... world's problems solved). Recycling should be your last resort.

JorgeBurgos

Tachyon (+1).

Just because something _can_ be recycled doesn't mean that there is good justification for doing so.

The primary reason that there are more trees in the US than at any other time in our history is because paper and lumber companies are in the business of...chopping down trees. They plan for demand decades in advance and plant accordingly. Without trees to cut down they wouldn't be in business. All of the strident yelping about "LOSING TREES" is illogical and juvenile.

skh.pcola

[gigoit.org] is a non-profit site that lets you find reusable items in your area, similar to freecycle but with many advantages. We have a member rating system, ability to find items by their distance away from you, access to RSS feeds of our data, google gadgets, etc. You don't need to sign up to search the site; simply enter your zip code and how far you want to travel for free things. Our member feedback system discourages no-shows, which is a major problem with the freecycle service. Full disclosure, I am one of the developers and founders of Gigoit.

jkramlich

Consider checking your facts on the rainforest bit. A big part of why those trees are cut is to create farmland. This is why it is common to hear of rainforests being burned rather than logged. I'm sure many paper products are produced from those trees, but only because it turns out to be more economic than burning them down, rather than because there is a great demand. In fact, as it turns out, as fewer trees are used for paper, more and more land previously used to farm trees will be used for other forms of agriculture. This may seem like an improvement, but generally corn and wheat do not process as much Carbon Dioxide as trees, so this can lead to a net increase in global warming.

On the subject of global warming, I checked, and while the total energy used to pulp recycled paper is less than pulping timber, recycling tends to produced more green house gasses than using fresh timber, further exacerbating the problem.

Finally, it is widely agreed that recycled products generally cost more than those made from virgin materials. In some cases, as with plastics, the extra cost is justifiable, in that it reduces waste which would otherwise long outlive the society that created it. However, in the case of paper products, there is no particular harm in filling a landfill, and the extra money could certainly be put towards solving more pressing issues (or even used to defray the costs of recycling the more problematic waste products).

So I'll stick with what I said before: recycling is important with regards to materials which are not biodegradable, as these things will build up in landfills. However, in the case of most paper products, it probably isn't worth the additional effort and cost.
/rant

Tachyon0118

@Tachyon0118: Err...It ought to be obvious. It reduces the waste in the resources department. It reduces the demand on supply of trees, which is high and usually is bouyed by cutting down rainforests.

Also, while you might object to the energy needed to recycle paper and to move it to the recycling plant, it's far less then the energy needed to pulp and process a tree after shipping it from the amazon.

Kin

@LastVigilante

Why are you working so hard to recycle paper (if you meant reuse, like writing on the backs of printed papers, disregard my comments)? Last I checked (and feel free to correct me) paper is biodegradable, so when you throw it away and it gets buried in a landfill, it is in fact being "recycled." I fully support the recycling of things like plastic that don't break down easily, or Aluminum cans, which are one of the only economical things to recycle, but with regards to paper products, creating a separate system to transport and recycle them rather than just sending them to landfills seems at best pointless and at worst more detrimental to the environment due to the effects of the recycling process.

On the other hand, the things suggested in this article about actually reusing things seems great. No processing, minimal shipping, everything that would be important.

Tachyon0118

It's really encouraging to see that people are still making headway in coming up with ways to reuse and recycle our trash. :D Reducing is always good, as is reusing, and I'm always about freecycling, but when it does have to go in the trash, it's good to know it can be recycled instead.

phoenix

Yeah, it's not hard to reduce, reuse, recycle if you just put a little thought into it and check out what your local places will accept. What irks me is wasteful packaging on many consumer products... packaging that is more voluminous than needed and not even marked appropriately for recycling.

Logical Extremes

@RubberduckGrrl: Mmmm. Re-Goo.
Unfortunately the same cannot be said for my area, it is especially frustrating in commercial areas (offices, stores) and apartment/condo communities how little, if any, recycling programs there are. I work in an office complex with no recycling, and I've taken to collecting large bags of trash paper to take home with me every week to recycle.

LastVigilante

There are TONS of items that can be recycled nowadays. Where I live it is very popular - and mandatory. I wish that it were required throughout the US. Did you know that even used chewing gum is being recycled now? (Seriously!)

RubberduckGrrl

I go through a number of hearing aid batteries ( too many nights at punk, new wave, and jazz clubs in my youth) so I collect them in a glass jar that I keep in the cupboard for recycling at the town dump.

It also keeps a potentially hazardous substance (lithium) from being swallowed by household pets.

Whenever possible, I use rechargeable batteries for the gizmos such as remotes, cameras, wall clocks, smoke alarms, portable media players, etc.

mondotofu

Sounds like the Freecycle program, where you join an email group and people offer up things that they're getting rid of for free, like broken TVs or sattelite dishes or anything really, and all you have to do is go pick it up from them. You can join for free but in order to ask for things (or maybe just take things) you have to offer up something of your own first (or something like that). You join a group for your county or region and everything is local.

Jenkinsm