If the clothing is 100% cotton, it’s COMPOSTABLE! I’ve been reading all about composting on instructables.com and we’re making our own composter today! I’ve been saving the legs from cutoff jeans (cut up like crude confetti) and even dryer lint to use as some of the dry matter in our compost. Polyester and rayon clothing won’t work for composting – it has to be natural fibers.

If you don’t compost, find someone who does. We’re also looking for offices that want to get rid of shredded paperwork because our household produces way more vegetable and fruit matter scraps than dry papery matter and there has to be a balance when composting.

Another thing that I did with thrashed clothing is to make it into cloth diapers. The “new” cloth diapers are really awesome and have removable inserts that are just basically lots of layers of cloth sewn in a rectangle, and these inserts are then inserted into the crotch area of the cloth diaper between the outer waterproof layer and the inner cushy layer that touches baby. This worked brilliantly for our last 2 children and I felt great about finding a 2nd life for our thrashed clothes and sewing scraps that would otherwise be discarded. Non-natural fabrics can be used in cloth diapering – in fact, polar fleece was very helpful.

Source: yahoo answers

Log making is becoming increasingly popular amongst people wanting to not only save money on their heating costs but also recycle all that waste paper and card that accumulates at home.

Log making involves turning all that recycled waste card and paper into burnable logs that can be used as fuel for the open fire or wood burning stove
– getting rid of up to 30 % of the contents of your rubbish bin in the process.

What can be turned into logs?

Almost any household waste can be turned into burnable logs – including: junk mail, paper, newspaper, cardboard, tissues, ripped up toilet rolls, food and household packaging and even tea-bags – even garden waste such as twigs, branches, sawdust and dried leaves and foliage can be converted into free burnable fuel for the wood burning stove or open hearth.

Not only does this drastically reduce the amount of waste you throw away but as it can all be turned into burnable fuel for the fire it can help reduce heating costs too.

But are log makers green?

Obviously when you burn anything smoke is produced which is harmful to the environment; however, all home heating systems rely on fuel being burned – whether that is at a large power station to provide electricity
, or by burning fuel in your own hearth.

But the great eco friendly advantage of log makers is that they compact the burnable waste into logs that burn more slowly – producing lots of heat for very little smoke.

How to make logs?

To make free fuel for the fire you only need two things:

* Burnable waste (see above for the types of material that can be burned)
* A Log maker

The log maker will compress the waste paper and card into tight and compact logs. These can then be stored until you are ready to use them for the fire. There are a wide range of log makers on the market – some create dry logs, while a wet log maker uses water to compact the logs even tighter. The Original Log Maker is highly recommended as it is inexpensive and is easy to use to create free burnable waste for the fire.

Read the original article at articlesbase

As you know, we use various kinds of materials for the manufacturing millions of products. These materials include pure metals, alloys, plastic, rubber, etc, which themselves have different properties due to the composition of the chemicals added to achieve certain material properties like color, strength, etc.

The highest degree of difficulty is encountered in sorting the materials while recycling. Like stated before, one family of material itself, say, metals, vary in composition. So the chemicals used and the processes required too vary drastically. For example, Cleaning of aluminium and extraction of gold can be achieved by acid treatment, but you cannot expect to do the same for iron or copper.

Most of the metals, which include inert metals as well as toxic ones like lead from batteries will come in corroded or worse conditions. Isolation of these materials from the good stuff are pretty dangerous.

The sorting becomes further harder, when it comes to treatment of plastics and disposed electronic products and batteries. Only a few kinds can be recycled, while others cannot. So one has to remove the kinds which cannot be treated or recycled in any way. Carelessness of those who dump non recyclable items into the recycle bin are the ones to be blamed for such troubles.

However, if automation can be done in the areas where manual presence is still needed, recycling can be made effective to a new level, thus further reducing the required quantity of raw materials for making a new batch of products. Also, the quantity of waste products scattered out in the open can be reduced as well.

Wholesale Plastic Bags

Advantages:
Recycling is good! It’s good for the environment, it’s good for practicing green-living, and plastic is bad for the environment because it takes hundreds of years to biodegrade. (which means it cannot just disappear into its surroundings)
We can use it for other stuff, we have less waste on the planet, which makes more room for living, less money is spent on using more resources to make plastic, and less energy is used to make newer plastic, which saves the economy some money

Disadvantages:
It take money, time, and energy to recycle plastic itself. Don’t forget, recycling plants also use electricity, as much as it recycles. We need to separate the plastic sometimes because it may be attached to other elements that need to be recycled differently. (You know those Sips iced Tea Boxes? They’re made with paper, plastic and metal, so there’s no way to recycle it.)

Source: yahoo answers

Clothes unsalvageable even for the Salvation Army?

This September, New York City will unveil one of the largest textile-recycling initiatives in the country. Its purpose: To make recycling unwanted threads as pain-free as pitching them in the garbage—no small feat, considering that a Goodwill Industries survey of 600 North American adults found that more than half wouldn’t travel more than 10 minutes to save their duds from the dumpster…

Read the original article at ecouterre