Garbage is becoming a very big problem in the United States since the average person produces about 4.3 pounds of garbage per day. This translates to about 220 million tons of waste for the year with about 72 million tons of this being paper or paperboard material. Even though much of this paper is recycled to make new products and reduce the amount of new material that would be required to meet the demands of modern life, that is still a lot of trash to contend with in the garbage collection system.
However, even if you are not one of those persons who have decided to live garbage free, there is much that can be done on an individual level to reduce the amount of waste that you produce by trying your hand at doing your own recycling.
Do-it-yourself craft ideas
It is easy to find craft ideas if you search for them. There are many websites that are dedicated to projects that will help you to express your more creative side with paper. Some of the ideas that can be helpful in helping you to make useful products from paper include a brown paper bag place mat for those myriad brown bags that you never seem to know what to do with from the supermarket.
You can also express your creative side by using other ideas such as making gift wrappers from cereal boxes, making gift bows for your presents and tokens made from magazine pages or even pizza boxes as a canvas for your art projects (providing it did not get too greasy)
Personal waste to energy
Your identity can be stolen from the papers in your trash. It is estimated that approximately 15 million Americans have had their identities stolen with personal losses averaging about $3500 each. One way to prevent this is to make paper bricks from the personal papers that you would ordinarily throw out that contain your delicate information. The paper brick can be made by softening the paper either by soaking them in water for a few days or putting them through a wash cycle in your washing machine with a paper-masher bag.
After compacting those in a container where the water can dry out, the paper bricks can then be burnt in your fireplace. It does not produce the smoke and pollutants that are usually associated with burning paper and it can possibly save you some money on your electricity bill in the winter (at least for a few hours) depending on the amount you made. Talk to your local waste experts, such as Progressive Waste Solutions of FL Inc., for more information.
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