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Shop for recycled-content products like wrapping paper, plush toys, and rubber tire shoes to give new life to perfectly functional materials. They also require less energy to manufacture and prevent landfills from overflowing with valuable resources.

How to buy recycled-content products

Increasing in popularity and availability, these products resurrect once-used materials for another day of useful function. By choosing these products instead of those made from new materials, you’ll also be supporting the ever-important recycling industry.

• Make kid gift-giving a little greener. Opt for plush toys, plastic toys, and push toys made from recycled materials.
• Wrap them with recycled giftwrap made from 100 percent post-consumer content and opt for recycled greeting cards.
• Choose recycled toilet paper instead of virgin paper brands to avoid single-use old-growth forest products.
• Support plastic recycling and old soda containers, including rugs, sleeping bags, and shoes.
• Winterproofing your home? Think newspapers and denim jeans—the stuff of recycled insulating materials. Or opt for a new roof made of recycled materials.
• Next time you redecorate, choose a couch, table, bed, or chairs made from reclaimed or recycled wood to cut forest destruction.
• Refresh rooms with recycled paint instead of standard paint brands to conserve landfill space, save natural resources, and cut toxic paint disposal.
• Choose recycled wood floors instead of those made from virgin timber to create a unique, eco-friendly room. If you prefer carpet, opt for brands with carpet take-back programs to ensure it's recycled.
• From envelopes to paper, stationery to sticky notes—choose choose recycled paper goods for your home or office and protect forests. Even wedding invitations can be made from post-consumer paper.
• Literary types can read books and magazines printed on recycled paper.
• If you’re in need of new tires, choose remolded or retreaded tires—they use fewer raw resources and might save you money.
• Looking to spruce up your fashion accessories? You won’t believe the selection in jewelry made from recycled materials (ever thought a subway token could be fashionable?).
• Make sure your next pair of shoes is green by choosing brands made from recycled bottles or reused rubber tires.
• Eat outdoors or at your next office event on recycled dishes and flatware.
• Gardeners can darken their green thumbs even more with a variety of recycled garden goods.

Before you buy

Green claims may not mean real-life eco-friendly products, so dig a little to be sure your recycled-content purchase is truly green. A recent study by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing found that of the 1,018 products examined, all but one committed at least a few sins of greenwashing in their attempt to convince consumers that their product was greener than it actually was.

Need a little help distinguishing the true thing from the fakes? Check out this Responsible Shopper guide which'll give you the skinny on the social and environmental impact of major corporations. And check out What's Green? to find out how GreenYour chooses products.

Buying recycled-content products helps you go green because…

• It supports recycling programs, which make use of post-consumer materials, thus reducing resource and energy use and keeping waste out of landfills.

Recycling turns an object that would otherwise need to be disposed of into a usable resource. In 2006, recycling, including composting, resulted in diverting 82 million tons of material away from landfills and incinerators, up from 34 million tons in 1990. About 8,660 curbside collection programs serve nearly half of Americans. In 2006, these along with drop-off and buy-back centers, diverted about 32.5 percent of the nation's solid waste.[1][2]

Recycling may be a more sustainable way of dealing with solid waste than incineration or putting it in a landfill, but it has drawbacks. For example, recycling still requires the energy and other resources necessary to collect, transport, sort, and process the recyclable waste. However, recycling saves some of the energy and other resources required to create new materials like paper or glass, and helps to minimize harmful practices like strip mining and clear cutting.[3]

Since some materials like aluminum can be recycled locally over and over indefinitely, the costs of transporting raw materials long distances for manufacturing can be reduced or eliminated as well. Recycling even plays a role in reducing emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. Recycling programs are estimated to have kept the equivalent of 39 million car's worth of carbon out of the atmosphere in 2006, saving the equivalent of 10 billion gallons of gasoline.[4]

A key factor in the viability of recycling programs is demand for recycled products. When consumers purchase products made from recycled materials, they are not only saving valuable natural resources and energy, but are also supporting necessary markets for recycled materials.[5]

External links

• California Integrated Waste Management Board - Buy Recycled Programs
• CorpWatch Greenwash Awards
• County of Ventura - Integrated Waste Management Division: Why Buy Recycled Products?
• Greenwashing Index
• Waste News.com