Morris County Recycle Center

Morris County Recycle Center Morris County Recycle Center Why recycle? Reduce litter, save energy, preserve our natural resources, cleaner environment. Recycling does make a difference!

Recycling makes you feel good and it's the right thing to do! Recycle compartment trailer is located at S&S fuel pumps across from the Elementary School in Council Grove. We pick it up on Monday and Friday mornings at 8:00 am to empty contents at the Recycle Center. Please sort your recyclables in appropriate bins.

08/31/2015

UNRECYCLABLES:
Butcher & Baker Paper: They have a plastic lining.

Overnight Envelopes: They're made with plastic fibers.

Juice Boxes: Also known as "Brick Packs", can't be recycled, they're made of aluminum foil, paper AND plastic.

Photographs: They're coated with chemicals.

Plastic containers: Any that have a #7 on the bottom are made with unrecyclable plastic.

Tea Bags: The tea is the problem; but you can compost them.

05/20/2015

Have you ever seen used motor oil? It's dirty, thick, black, and full of toxic engine crud.

It looks like it could never be cleaned...but it can. When motor oil is "re-fined" it's just as good as new. In fact, according to oil recyclers, motor oil never wears out; it can be re-fined and used forever.

Why recycle oil?

Throwing oil in the trash - even in airtight containers is just like pouring it on the ground. The oil will seep out and leach into groundwater when containers are crushed.

A quart of motor oil can pollute over 250,000 gallons of water.

We make our own oil spills: over 62% of all oil-related pollution in the U.S. is caused by improper disposal of used motor oil.

04/09/2015

Here's a riddle: What's a foot long, is sitting in your car, and has about 20 pounds of poison in it? Want a hint? You probably never think of it unless your car won't start.

Yes, it's your car battery, which contains 18 pounds of toxic lead, and a gallon of sulfuric acid - two hazardous wastes you don't want to dump into the environment.

Fortunately, you can take a car battery to a gas station or auto parts store, and they'll recycle it for you.

Americans recycle about 80 percent or our car batteries. But the other 20 percent - containing about 330 million pounds of lead - wind up in landfills.

How are batteries recycled? Companies called "battery breakers" crack each one open and drain out the sulfuric acid (which is either reprocessed or sent to a hazardous waste facility). Then the batteries go to a scrap yard. The lead is removed and shipped to a mill, where it's melted down into ingots. It's sold to manufacturers......and might very well end up in you new car battery. The polypropylene case is also recycled.

Why recycle? It's estimated that three out of every four Americans who change their own car batteries throw them away instead of recycling. In landfills, battery cases eventually crack, allowing the lead and acid to pollute groundwater.

Lead is poisonous. It can cause liver, kidney and brain damage. Batteries contribute 2/3 of all lead in municipal waste. Incinerating batteries spews lead into the air.

03/24/2015

START COMPOSTING TODAY at home.

Americans throw away over 28 million tons of mowed grass, dead leaves and branches every year - over 20% of all our solid waste.

Grass makes up over 70% of all yard waste. (The amount varies by region.) That's remarkable because grass doesn't even need to be picked up - if the clippings are short enough, they will quickly decompose and supply the soil with nitrogen and carbon.

Fallen leaves contain over 50-80% of the nutrients that a tree extracts from the earth. By composting them, we're helping the earth replenish itself.

When seemingly "safe" yard waste is buried in landfills - where there isn't much oxygen - it releases explosive methane gas, a powerful "greenhouse gas" that contributes to air pollution and global warming. Methane and other toxins can also condense into liquid and leach into groundwater.

03/19/2015

Polystyrene foam is completely non-biodegradable. It just won't go away. Even 500 years from now, the foam coffee cup you used this morning will be sitting in a landfill.

Foam that doesn't get buried or burned winds up in the ocean, where it endangers animals like turtles, who mistake it for food.

Polystyrene foam is made from benzene, a known carcinogen. It's converted to styrene, and then injected with gases to make it a foam product. The gases are either pentane (which contributes to smog) or HCFC-22 (which contributes to ozone layer destruction).

02/18/2015

Here's a quiz. Which of these items are made of low-density polyethylene (LDPE, for short)? It doesn't matter if you've never heard of the stuff - take a guess anyway.

A. The shrink wrap on CD's,
B. Plastic sandwich bags, or
C. The plastic cover that protects your dry-cleaning.
The answer: All of them.

This thin, "filmy" substance is the leader in the plastic packaging world. Every year we use well over 5 million tons - over 9.5 billion pounds of it. And how much is currently recycled? Not much.

Why recycle?

Plastic bags and film wrappings account for over 40% of our plastic garbage. Most of it's going to be sitting in landfills for centuries.

There's no evidence yet that "biodegradable" plastic bags safely degrade in landfills. At best, the bags break into invisible - and probably toxic - little chips. So recycling is a better option.

Theoretically, the more LDPE we recycle, the less we'll need to produce. That means less oil and natural gas used, and fewer chemicals like benzene produced in manufacturing it.

Plastic bags are among the few plastic products that may be recycled in a closed loop - i.e., recycled plastic bags are made into more plastic bags.

12/23/2014

Laundry soap, butter containers, coffee containers, oil jugs, etc. - anything with a #2 or #5 on the bottom, is called high density polyethylene (HDPE, for short).

12/22/2014

PET ( #1) plastic means polyethylene terephthalat. This is usually water bottles, clear plastics, a lot of deli trays (even black bottom trays with clear tops), peanut butter jars, etc. PET bottles are actually a form of polyester. About a third of all the carpeting made in the U.S. has recycled PET bottles in it. Other uses are: 26 recycled PET bottles equals a polyester suit; five recycled PET bottles make enough fiberfill to stuff a ski jacket.

12/17/2014

If Americans recycled their phone books for a year, we could save over 650,000 tons of paper.

If all our phone books were kept out of landfills, we could save over 2 million cubic yards of landfill space.

Although phone books are made with the lowest possible quality paper, they can still be reprocessed and made into ceiling tiles, text book covers, record album covers and insulation.

12/16/2014

When people in the recycling business talk about cardboard, they usually mean corrugated cardboard, which is made from brown kraft paper (The other kind - cereal boxes, etc. - is called boxboard). Corrugated cardboard is made by sandwiching a layer of fluted paper between two flat sheets of paper, and then gluing all three together.

To recycle: remove any contents and foreign materials - like foam packings, plastic, string, wire, wood (some boxes are partly made of wood). Pull tape off, too.

If you're recycling corrugated pizza boxes: clean off the food first. If they're really greasy, it's better to throw them away.

Don't mix waxed corrugated boxes with the regular corrugated. Wax boxes aren't recyclable. Once paper fibers are impregnated with wax, they can't be reclaimed.

You can recycle wet boxes. Note: Brown paper bags can be recycled with cardboard.

12/12/2014

HOW IS PAPER MADE????? A pulp "soup" is concocted by boiling wood chips, water and chemicals together in an industrial-size blender. This separates wood fibers from lignin - the "glue" that holds the wood together. Then, the fibers are beat into something that looks like oatmeal.

Next, the mix is bleached - often repeatedly - with chlorine (unless it's brown paper like cardboard). Chlorine bleaching produces dioxins. According to one source, "Modern pulp and paper production technology creates some of the most toxic effluent any industry can produce." But that's beginning to change: A few companies are starting to use non-chlorine bleach as an alternative.

Starch is added to make the fibers bond together, the paper is dried on a moving screen, and then wound onto a giant spool.

HOW IS IT RECYCLED???? Back in the blender, shredded bales of paper are mixed with warm water, heated and mashed into pulp.

Paper clips and string are strained out and any ink is dissolved with a solvent and removed. Then it's bleached again, but less bleach is required, since the pulp has already been whitened once. Sometimes alternatives to chlorine bleach are used.

Paper can be recycled up to 7 times, depending on how long fibers are to begin with.

12/03/2014

Aluminum can recycling saves 95% of the energy needed to make aluminum from bauxite ore. Making cans from recycled aluminum cuts related air pollution (for example, sulfur dioxides, which create acid rain) by 95%. Americans throw away enough aluminum every three months to rebuild our entire commercial air fleet. A quarter of all aluminum goes into packaging. The all-aluminum can was introduced in 1964. A paper grocery sack holds about 1.5 pounds of empty aluminum cans.

Address

Council Grove, KS
66846

Opening Hours

Monday 8am - 4:30pm
Tuesday 8am - 4:30pm
Wednesday 8am - 4:30pm
Thursday 8am - 4:30pm
Friday 8am - 4:30pm

Telephone

(620) 767-5519

Website

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