America Recycles Day Tips

With America Recycles Day (Nov. 15) around the corner, here are PaintCare's tips on Five Ways to Recycle in the Bay Area!

PAINT RECYCLING MADE EASY
PaintCare is a nonprofit organization that operates the paint recycling program in California and ten other jurisdictions. Visit one of the more than 825 drop-off sites across the state (mainly at hardware and paint retail stores and household hazardous waste facilities) to finally unload all that unwanted paint you’ve been holding onto. For more information, visit www.paintcare.org.

SPRING BACK
Nearly 20 million mattresses end up in U.S. landfills each year. ByeByeMattress is a national nonprofit making it easy to recycle your old mattress and box springs. Up to 75 percent of the materials can be recycled and the agency has collected more than 5 million mattresses so far, which reduces the waste in landfills and provides jobs for recyclers. For more information, visit www.byebyemattress.com.

POP A CORK, SAVE A TREE
The next time you pop open one of your Napa or Sonoma Valley favorites save the cork and help save the trees. Cork ReHarvest recycles the eco-friendly bottle stoppers through collection boxes in grocery stores, wine shops, and tasting rooms and a low carbon footprint transportation and reuse supply chain. The group also educates the public about the vital importance of preserving Mediterranean cork forests. To find a collection box near you, visit www.corkforest.org.

A SOURCE FOR THE RESOURCEFUL
SCRAP breathes new life into old arts and crafts supplies and reduces waste by diverting more than 200 tons of materials heading to landfill every year. Your donations of quality re-usable materials such as textiles, buttons, paper, craft and office supplies, plastics, and wood are sorted and made available to teachers, parents, artists, and organizations. For more information, visit www.scrap-sf.org.

CRAZY CRAYONS
This recycling education community service has made it possible to stop more than 120,000 pounds of unwanted crayons from going into landfills! They take unwanted, rejected, broken crayons to a better place, where they will be recycled into new crayons! You don’t have to do anything to the crayons you’re donating! Just collect (any amount), box, and ship them as they are. For more information, visit www.crazycrayons.com.

This list was developed for America Recycles Day on behalf of PaintCare, a national paint stewardship nonprofit that sets up drop- off locations for unused paint, arranges for recycling and proper disposal, and conducts public education. The other organizations were identified via online research so we can’t vouch for organizations or the accuracy of the online information.