Recycling in the Home and Office

Steve Coe: I'm Steve Coe with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Today, we are talking about how to recycle and now we are going to talk about recycling in the home and in the office.

For recycling to work and these to be both convenient and recognizable. So in the home or the office you need to set aside an area where the recycle is going to be collected either thought separate bins for materials that are not going to be trashed or by posting signs and other informational pieces around the offices as an example as how recycling can be done.

Recycling in the home requires that everyone understand how materials should be separated and collected. In most cases this is through a separate bin or some separate area of the house. In businesses you have the same type of needs. People need to know what materials are going to be collected, where they need to be taken to be recycled and what the benefits of that recycling would be. For the home owner, being a part of recycling and realizing the environmental benefits of that is very important. It's also important for the businesses. A business can also reduce its disposal cost if enough material is collected and devoted for recycling. Suppose you have an office for 12 people and you generate a lot of waste paper as part of your trash. After looking at recycling, you decide to recycle that materials instead of put it into your dumpster and your dumpster is being picked up two times a week by a contractor. You will soon discover that dumpster is not as full as it has meant and you may be able to adjust the number of times the trash is picked up and therefore having that savings in disposal cost. That's recycling in the home and in the office. Our next segment will deal with recycling specialty materials, such as electronics and used oil.