Well, we missed another “holiday,” this time being America Recycles Day.  It was Saturday.  Now, treehugger thinks this is a (explitive deleted) holiday, and we should make November 15 Zero Waste Day.  Part of the reasoning is that America Recycles Day is brought to you by the fine people that make things that are put in recyclable despensers: Coke, Bud, Coors, the bottled water industry, and so forth.  It seems also that they’re not too happy with the fact that recycling is a transfer of responsibility from corporations to taxpayers. But what they fail to realize are these very impressive and completely false facts about recycling:

–Every time you say “I don’t believe in recycling,” a fairy dies.

–Did you know that the energy saved from recycling just one can is enough to power the sun for fifty years?

–Recycling comes from the Latin, “recyclicaie,” which means “to be way sexy.”

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A crew for the CBS investigative journalism program 60 Minutes was roughed up at a Chinese electronic waste site. 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley and his crew were in the Middle Kingdom to trace the illegal black market electronic waste in the world’s most populous country. Upon entering a facility in Guiyu, on the south coast of China, the crew was attacked by a gang of workers who attempted to take their cameras. The crew managed to escape and brought back footage of the incident to air on CBS this week.

The workers at the facility had reason to want to take the cameras as their activities are highly illegal even in the loosely regulated world of Chinese industry. Improper dismantling of e-waste for the black market, as was being done in Guiyu, produces some of the most harmful pollutants known to man. The City of Guiyu is afflicted with some of the highest levels of cancer causing agents on Earth while pregnancies there are 6 times more likely than normal to result in miscarriage and 7 out of 10 children have too much lead in their blood.

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Japanese Electronics Giants Panasonic, Sharp and Toshiba announced plans to participate in a massive electronics program last week. The corporations will be joining forces with Manufacturers Recycling Management LLC in creating a national recycling infrastructure for their products via a 50 state rollout of recycling centers by January of 2009. The first phase of the program will start of this month in California, Connecticut, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin expanding to the rest of the nation throughout next year.

This is a very important program to eliminate the industrial waste of components within our electronic items. Landfills and conventional recycling programs across the country simply do not have the resources of know how to properly handle the complicated components in our laptops, stereos, televisions and boom boxes. Worse yet, many programs which advertise that they will in fact “recycle” these items, actually ship them to impoverished countries for disadvantaged people to try and salvage small amounts of gold and other substances out of them by hand, an unsafe practice which is causing a human health crisis around the world.

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These top 10 things we bet you didn’t know you can recycle are ready and waiting to be reduced, reused, and diverted away from our already abundant landfills. The editors at Co-op America have done all of the “dirty” work for you by finding new eco-friendlier homes for the garbage that doesn’t go into your standard municipal recycling bins. Check out the list below, then and leave comments with other creative ideas for reducing and recycling household waste.

1. Appliances

Goodwill accepts working appliances, www.goodwill.org, or you can contact the Steel Recycling Institute to recycle them. 800/YES-1-CAN, www.recycle-steel.org.

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