Tulsa, OK

Just to follow up on last week’s post:

Recycling conserves natural resources, protects the environment and reduces litter. Many natural resources, including minerals like aluminum, copper, lead and zinc; sand; coal, oil and natural gas occur in limited supplies. They are non-renewable. As we use them to make things, we use them up.

It took a long, long time for nature to produce these resources through natural decay, erosion, compaction and the forces of heat. No additional supplies can be created for a long time, and certainly not during our lifetimes or the lifetime of our children and grandchildren.

Other resources are renewable, meaning that given time nature can produce more. One renewable resource is trees. When people cut down a tree for fuel or to make products, another tree can be grown. But it doesn’t happen over night; the tree may need to grow for a decade before it can be cut down and used. And too much tree-cutting can destroy habitat needed by plants and animals to survive, not to mention that trees take in carbon dioxide and give back the oxygen that we all need to live.

One way to make sure that we will have enough of these materials with which to make things for decades to come is to:

Reduce the amount we use;

Reuse the product for something else at home or at work; and

Recycle – turn in the product so that manufacturers can use it to make something else or make another of the same type of product.

It’s easy for all Tulsans to recycle. All City of Tulsa customers with residential trash service can sign up for convenient curbside recycling of newspaper, junk mail, magazines, office paper, plastic, glass and aluminum.

Tulsans also can take those and other recyclables to one of the 12 free drop-off sites in the area operated by the Metropolitan Environmental Trust (M.e.t.).

And, you can recycle many household pollutants at one of the biannual Fairgrounds Pollutant Collection events, operated by the City of Tulsa Public Works Environmental Operations division and the M.E.T. Be sure to visit the City of Tulsa website to learn more about what can be recycled, and what is considered hazardous waste – you might be surprised!