The following are notes from a recent Portland Peak Oil meeting with lots of good ideas about Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. Anyone else with any other ideas??

Also, please note that Free Geek is not the only place to recycle. In Beaverton is a company called E-Tech Recycling, found at www.etechrecycling.com . They are located at 444 SW 170th Ave., Suite 103, Beaverton OR 97005. 503-693-8939. They take computers, printers, DVD players, TV's as well as fluorescent light bulbs. You may have to pay a little for them to recycle, like 50 cents for a compact fluoresent bulb but that's fair enough.

Anyway, here are the ideas from Portland Peak Oil:

Notes from the Peak Oil Meeting, April 23, 2008 by Kelly R.

Speaker: Betty Shelley, Master Recycler, from the Metro Recycling Hotline

Betty and her husband Jon use only one garbage can of garbage a year.
They carefully recycle everything else.

Betty said that when she took the Master Recycler class she learned the
concept of "pre-cycling" i.e., when you are about to buy something, look at
its packaging and try to determine what you are going to do with it. She
says at times, she will see a package of cookies, or something that she
wants but that she doesn't buy it because of the packaging.

For example, they are primarily vegetarians, but when they do eat meat, they
buy boneless cuts of meat so they do not have to deal with what to do with
"the carcass". If there are bones or say, chicken skin, or fish skin, they
will put it in a plastic bag and keep it in the freezer until their one can
of garbage a year.

She reminded us that "Reduce" and "Reuse" come before Recycle, and that
following voluntary simplicity ideas, they carefully weigh what they spend
their money on. She recommended the book, *Your Money or Your Life*.

They also are very thoughtful about what comes into their house and what can
they do with it. She said that reusing requires creativity. For example,
the white cottony stuff that comes in your vitamins can be used as a cotton
ball, a make-up applier. Old pantyhose can be cut up into soft plant ties.
Old t-shirts make great cleaning rags.

She said that landfills are very expensive to maintain. When you think
about throwing something away, think about where "away" is. One needs to
raise one's consciousness about what happens to things you acquire.

Everything you buy is a choice, a choice of what you are spending your money
on, and then a choice of what you will do with the packaging.

Aluminum is always more easily recycled than plastic.

She always chooses recycled paper products, particularly unbleached
ones. White paper products are bleached with dioxin.

Composting is one of the better things to do with kitchen garbage, as we all
know. She also talked about the difficulties of recycling for people who
live in apartments.

She handed out a list of plastic drop sites, and mentioned that Metro was
having several plastic round-up days on May 3rd and on May 17th. (Personal
note: I went to my first plastic intake day a couple of months ago. I came
home with more than I took over! If there's something there that you can
use, you can take it. I got a couple of great empty kitty litter 5 gallon
pails with lids, I got two cute children's sized plastic chairs for my
grandchildren, and got lots of plastic planting pots of all sizes from tree
size to 2 " square, plus trays to put them in for starting seeds?in fact
they had tons of black pots of all sizes.)

Betty cooks from scratch and buys in bulk. She said that she and her
husband are on a limited income and buying in bulk at New Seasons makes
organic food more affordable.

She said that nearly all tin cans have a plastic liner which leaches nasty
stuff into your food. She said the only exception is Eden foods.

She talked about recycling aseptic packages (those that keep milk, soups,
soy milk good even though they are not refrigerated). You remove the
plastic pour spout, flatten it, and it can be recycled curbside. She is not
sure how much longer they will be acceptable, as they sometimes interfere
with recycling machines.

She mentioned that some things that can be used as school supplies, i.e.,
rubber bands, colored paper, etc., can be given to SCRAP, located on
Williams Avenue, which donates them to teachers for use in their classrooms.

There are places that take candle stumps, CD spindle cases, even CD's. There
is no place, however, that will take old cassette tapes.

She mentioned Free Geek as one place to dispose of electronics and TV's,
although she said that the Metro area's recycling rules will change starting
on May 1 with the new roll-out carts (they will accept yogurt and margarine
tubs), and that there will be another change on January 1, 2009, when they
will accept all the Free Geek-type stuff for free.

During discussion some films re recommended: *A Century of Self, the Power
of Nightmares*, and* The Story of Stuff*. Some are available on-line.

Some people will buy something, remove the packaging right there in the
store and give it back to the manager or check out clerk. Also some people
take the butcher wrap from grocery stores and bring it back to the stores
and put it in the store's trashcan.

Betty reminded us that Metro has a hotline (she answers it at times) and if
you have any question about recycling anything, they will be able to tell
you how.

The number is 503-234-3000. Metro is online as *
www.metro-region,org/recycling.*