Ten Top Ways to Reduce, Reuse
and Recycle at Home

1. Recycle!
   Separate your paper, plastics, glass and metal into containers for recycling. Your city or county has developed some great programs to make it easy for you to recycle. Check your transfer station regulations. Make sure you know the right way to recycle in your community The state of NH is currently revising rules and regulations to decrease the amount of material going into rapidly filling landfills and requiring recycling.
2. Recycle Carbonated Beverage Containers
   These containers are recyclable, so whether you are on the road for business, vacation, or a weekend outing, find a recycling bin to deposit your empty beverage containers into. And remember that most roadside rest stops now have beverage container recycling bins.
3. Grasscycle
   A great way to cut your trash and save you time is to grasscycle - mow without a bag and leave your grass clippings on the lawn to provide mulch and nutrients, save water, and save time. Your existing mower probably came with a kit to make it a mulching mower. These machines cut and re-cut grass into tiny particles, which drop down onto the soil. But remember - don’t mow wet grass. It will clump and pile.
4. Compost in Your Backyard
   If mowing without a bag isn’t your bag, try composting. Yard waste and some food scraps decompose into outstanding free topsoil and composting can reduce your trash by up to 25 percent - perhaps more. SKUUF is happy to have grass & yard clippings added to its composter as are many local farmers.
5. Landscape using local plants
   Exotics require extra work (fertilizers,etc) to maintain their health in our NH climate and frequently use excess water. Beware of invasive plants now invading our north country as the climate gets warmer. Remove them according to recommendations from your local Agricultural Agent. Think about Xeriscaping - landscaping with plants that don’t need much water - will help reduce water use and may save you some money. In addition, drought-tolerant plants tend to be slower growing and require less maintenance.
6. Reduce Household Waste
   There are a lot of little things you can do around the house to cut your trash in half. Find a home for unneeded items. Have a yard sale or give them to SKUUF for our sale. Donate to 2nd Comings! Buy in bulk whenever possible and, like your Mom said, eat your leftovers. Composting non meat wastes is a great idea and if you don’t want to compost at home, bring your material to SKUUF for composting. Use cloth or string bags at the grocery store instead of paper or plastic. At home, use reusable containers to store leftovers and other items. Avoid over packaged products - the little toy in the box, inside the bigger box, encased in foam blocks, and sealed in another box. It costs you money to throw away this packaging (and more money to buy it in the first place!)
7. Join the Paperless Society
   Use e-mail. Send electronic greetings for special events and you can save money and paper. Don’t make paper copies if they are not necessary. And get off the junk mail lists. Estimates are that paper takes up 70% of landfill besides needless removing trees from our landscape. Use cloth napkins and towels instead of paper napkins and paper towels to save natural resources, reduce waste, and save money!
8. Good Recycling Starts at Home
   Recycled materials are processed and used to make new products. One big problem is that paper, plastic, and other commodities are easily contaminated. Be careful to sort your materials appropriately, or the whole load may wind up in the landfill instead of at a recycling manufacturer. What can you do? Flatten your cardboard boxes. Don’t put plastic bags inside paper bags, and don’t leave paper receipts inside plastic bags. It is true that plain white paper is worth more that mixed paper and hopefully we will see NH transfer stations start asking for white paper to be separated out in the future. Remove the caps before you recycle milk jugs and other plastic containers. And please wash out recyclables so they don’t attract bugs, mold, and mice. Earth’s resources are too precious to waste and in addition, creation of all this material takes energy and adds to our carbon imprint. For recycling to succeed we all need to check the labels and to buy products made with recycled content. Everything from clothes to carpeting, cans to comic books, are made from recycled materials. You are doing your part when you help close the recycling loop.
9. Do No Harm
   It is illegal to put used oil and hazardous household products such as pesticides, paints, or gasoline into your family trash. Dumping them on the ground or into the storm drain is illegal and harms the environment. But you should not store used oil or unneeded hazardous products around your house or garage. What can you do? Take hazardous waste to specified dump which handles Hazardous Waste recycling each quarter. Notices are posted at your dump or in the paper. We usually have a notice posted at SKUUF. Do NOT use trash pick up that does not allow and in fact require recycling. If you live in a Town that does trash pick up without recycling call your Town Manager and complain. Talk to your Select Board members and complain.
10. Think Before You Buy or Dispose of Anything!
    Do you really need it or just want it? Will it last? How much will it cost to maintain? How much energy does it take to create and dispose of this item? What does it do to your carbon footprint? How will you dispose of it ?