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Don’t toss those phone books
Brand new phone books arrived recently on everyone’s doorsteps, and with them, the natural tendency to throw the old ones in the trash. Don’t do it! Recycle them instead.
There are no special phone book collection sites as there have been in years past, but local recycling centers — A & S Metals, 2100 Meadowlark, and AWARE Recycling, 640 S. Arizona — said they will accept them. They can both include a percentage of the phone books with the newspapers they ship to market.
Headwaters Recycling also said people are welcome to include phone books with the newspapers they take to the drop-off bins around town. The five Headwaters drop sites are at the following locations:
near the intersection of Excelsior and Platinum;
Wal-Mart parking lot;
near the main Post Office on Dewey Boulevard;
near the Hillcrest School on Continental Drive, and
Civic Center parking lot.
You may drop magazines and catalogs into the Headwaters bins as well, and those five drop-off sites are the only places in town where you may leave glass bottles and jars for recycling. We are lucky to have an outlet for glass. Many communities have no option but to landfill it.
Both A & S and AWARE also accept magazines and catalogs in addition to newspapers, and, of course, everybody will gladly take steel and aluminum cans off your hands — especially aluminum, which commands 60 to 70 cents a pound these days.
It’s really a crime to throw away aluminum since it takes such huge amounts of energy to produce it from bauxite ore, so please think ahead during the upcoming summer barbecue season and separate those cans out from the rest of the trash.
Butte residents readily embrace recycling, as evidenced by the strong turnout for The Standard’s Trash for Trees collection days. At the last one in early May, people turned in about 37,000 pounds of newsprint, raising $846 toward the purchase of trees. That money, along with the $950 from last fall, is going to the Butte Civic Improvement Committee for trees.
Trash for Trees accounts are also open year round at both A & S and AWARE so you don’t have to wait for a special collection day to donate. You may bring newspapers and other recyclables to those centers anytime and request that the revenue be earmarked for the trees account.
Maybe someday, Butte-Silver Bow will start a curbside recycling program to extend the life of our landfill and help conserve natural resources. But until such time, it’s still pretty easy and convenient to recycle, thanks to local recycling businesses and the Headwaters’ sites, which are subsidized by the county. Once you start, you won’t want to quit, and that’s good. This is one habit definitely worth passing along to the kids.
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