New Recycling Centers Starting June 1, the city of St. Charles will have peopled recyling centers open in several new locations on alternating Saturdays. All of the new locations for recycling centers are at the main gates of the City's nine parks. Some of the new sites accept only limited materials, however, so check the table below for materials accepted. The City welcomes volunteers to help with the crowds that are expected to stop by. Call James Owens at 555-6721 for information. After you've dropped off your materials for recycling, go play for a while in the park. You deserve it! Pre or Post? Janell Pessarra of Enviro-Printing recommends that you know the content of the recycled paper you use for printing. Recycled paper can contain raw stock made from pre-consumer waste or post-consumer waste or a combination of the two. EP uses recycled paper and soy ink for all its printing jobs. Soy ink comes from the completely renewable resource, the locally grown soybean. Contact Janell at 555-3581 for all your printing needs. Recyclable Art Recycle junk mail and turn it into usable paper? Jeannine McElmore of The Nature Store gives us this recipe: tear scraps of paper into a blender, add double the amount of water, blend, and pour into a deep square plastic bin. Then use the Papermaking Kit available from TNS that contains two screens, decorations, and a spatula to make your own handmade paper. Bake for 1/2 hour or dry in the sun for six hours. Drop by the store at 4800 Calhoun to see examples Jeannine has made—small cards embedded with green fern and stationery made from flower petals. Trash Trivia The topic for this month's trash trivia quiz is office waste paper. A drawing of all correct entries will be held at Wakefield Enterprises' corporate headquarters in Oakdale at 2 p.m. on April 1, with the winner receiving a 10-disk box of recycled high density disks from Enviro-Disk. Employees of any of the family of Wakefield Enterprises are, of course, not eligible to win. It has been estimated that the businesses in the St. Charles area generate approximately 100 tons of white office paper per year. That's literally a mountain of paper. For all the disks, which of the following mountains has the equivalent volume? Is it (a) Mt. St. Helen's in Washington, (b) Mt. Everest in Nepal, (c) Pike's Peak in Colorado, or (d) Space Mountain at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida? Recycle Toner Cartridges Trashing toner cartridges trashes our planet, too, so says Lou Dobbins of St. Charles Office Supply. Recycling toner cartridges from laser printers and personal copiers costs 50 percent less than purchasing new cartridges. SCOS provides free pickup and delivery on orders of $40 or more and a full guarantee on all toner supplies. Contact Lou at 555-2222 to find out more about saving money on toner supply costs while saving the environment at the same time! Take a Green Vacation You can combine the traditional vacation elements like lodging, sightseeing, and meals with the green experiences of participating in a variety of supervised environmental activities, all in the beautiful surroundings of sunny southern California. Monique DeVries, the new tour director for Enviro-Travel, has found out about many eco-vacation, soft adventure, tour packages available in the San Diego area where you can take positive action for the environment, like clearing and marking trails or planting trees. If you're not up for a working environmental vacation, then you can choose from walks, hikes, educational events, or interpretive programs. Call Monique at 555-9654 to get more information. Agency News The Department of Health and Environmental Concerns, working through its Pollution Prevention Board and the Assistance Committee to the Board, requests applications for a monetary rebate from the Recycling Resources Economic Opportunity Fund. The intent of the RREO rebate program is to financially assist free public recycling drop-off sites that must ship their recyclables considerable distances to bring them to market or to be further processed. The total amount of rebate dollars available for the period February 1st through May 31st is $250,000. For this round, 100% of the rebate is dedicated to free public recycling drop-off sites. Please review the informational packet and rebate application carefully as significant changes have been made to the rebate program. For assistance, please direct questions via email to moremoney2@my.state.us or to 555-999-2222. Recyclables on Ocean Floor The ocean floor has a disturbing amount of trash on it, and a disturbing amount of it could have been recycled. Researchers from the Georgia's Bay Aquarium have pored over a huge amount of video clips of trash discovered along the entire eastern coast The results are that plastics are the most common kind of trash down there, particularly plastic bags, with metals like soda and food cans coming in second. Glass bottles are common as well. "Unfortunately for me, I wasn't so surprised. I've seen plenty of trash as I've been annotating video," says one researcher. "The main way to combat this problem is to prevent all this stuff from getting to the ocean to begin with." We hope that everyone will make a committed effort to reduce this problem.