You know to separate your paper, plastic, glass and cardboard from your regular trash, and put it out on recycling day. But did you know that there are other ways that you can recycle beyond your curbside trash hauler? Here are four fresh ways, just with paper alone, that you can recycle or reuse paper.

1. Been noticing those green-and-yellow “dumpsters” in church and school parking lots lately? No, those aren’t new places for you to put your trash. They are paper-only recycling receptacles run through Abitibi’s Paper Retriever program. It rewards non-profit organizations with cash, based on the tonnage of paper collected in each of these bins. Your paper is still recycled–Abitibi makes newsprint–but now the recycling is benefitting a local school by helping it to buy new playground equipment or a community organization by giving it money to purchase uniforms for its sports teams.

Here’s what you can drop off in the Paper Retriever dumpsters:

• Newspapers
• Magazines
• Mail
• School & Office Papers (including shredded paper)
• Catalogs

2. Bring your newspaper to an animal welfare organization. Many rescue places use folded up newspaper, not just old towels and rags, to line the cages and pens of the animals they are nursing back to health. My daughter and I discovered this when we brought an injured wren, found flailing on our front step, to a wild animal rescue place near where we live. While most people think about bringing them linens, what places like these really need is newspaper–so they told us. (We also wrote them a check for $50 to help out since we had no newspaper to offer.)

3. Reuse paper for packing delicate items or shipping something. Don’t waste your money on packing peanuts or bubble wrap. Shredded paper and balled-up newspaper can do an adequate job of something breakable you need to ship or pack away, such as dishes or Christmas ornaments. Better yet reuse your cardboard egg cartons as additional padding to ensure nothing moves around in the box, and everything stays in one piece.

4. Sprinkle shredded paper in a compost pile. If you’ve started composting your food scraps, you may have noticed that stuff inside the bin can get a bit goopy–especially if your ratio of green-to-brown matter is a bit off. To dry things up, sprinkle some of the paper from your shredder into the compost pile, and stir it up. Sure, I end up spilling some out of the shredded paper out of compost bin from time to time, making my backyard look a little like the aftermath of an explosion at the confetti factory, but that’s all right. Once the shredded paper brings the moisture level down, decomposition will speed up. Don’t have a shredder? You can rip newspaper into shreds and mix that with your compost, too.

Have any other tips for thinking outside the recycling bin with paper? Post a comment to share your idea.

I’ve written before how the website/subscription service Fly Lady helps me to keep my house in order (somewhat), and today I realized how much Fly Lady helps me to stay green. One of her “surprise challenges” was to identify clutter in my home that could “bless” someone else. That is, stuff my family no longer needs, uses or wants and which we could donate to someone else. This is usually a no brainer for me, because I already donate clothes to a local charity when I can’t sell them on eBay.

However, today Fly Lady threw a little twist into the challenge. She suggested that we find three different places that would benefit from my giveaways. Let me tell you, that was not a no brainer. I knew I had stuff I wanted to give away but give away to three different places. How was I going to manage that? Eventually, I figured out how I could fulfill the challenge without throwing anything away, and having just returned from donating items to two of the three places, I thought you might benefit from this challenge as well.

First, last week I cleaned out my linen closet. As I’ve written before here and on Green Boot Camp, I did what I usually do when I find myself with old towels–I turned them into rags. But truth be told, old sheets don’t make great cleaning rags, and I had a bunch I wasn’t sure what to do with. Then I discovered that my local SPCA will take old blankets, sheets and towels, which they can use to make soft bedding for the dogs and cats waiting to be adopted. They’ll take towels, too, which they use after bathing animals. I grabbed two old shopping bags, filled them with my sheets that had seen better days, and this afternoon I drove over to the SPCA to fulfill one of my three giveaways. (I also popped in to see the dogs, not that I’m in the market to adopt another one, but they are just so cute I couldn’t help myself.)

Next, it’s been more than a year since I called The Purple Heart to come to my house to take away donations I can’t giveaway elsewhere. These include old books, which my library used to take but doesn’t have the room for anymore, furniture and clothing. I scheduled a pick up for two Mondays from now, and while, technically I didn’t give anything away today, I feel like I’ve fulfilled the second of my three giveaways.

It was on the third giveaway that I really got stuck, but then I looked around and noticed how many piles of old newspapers and magazines I had lying around. Sure, recycling is this Friday, and I could put them out then, but why not benefit a good cause with my recycling? So I bunched up the newspapers and magazines, and drove them to the Paper Retriever bin over at my daughter’s school. As I’ve written about before, this program from Abitibi allows schools to collect recycling (paper only) as part of their fund-raising efforts–the schools get money back from Abitibi based on how many tons of paper people recycle.

Do you have clutter sitting around that you can give away to three different sources? Can you do it in a green and philanthropic way, so that you’re keeping items out of the trash and benefiting a good cause at the same time? I’d love to hear how you might fulfill this kind of challenge like I did today.

This past weekend was a jumble of various green-related ideas, chores and other goodies, so today I’m just going to give you a smorgasbord of green-related thoughts–green food for thought, if you will. Hope you find some useful nuggets:

* Green & Black = Delicious Chocolate

The public relations agency that represents Green & Black’s Organic chocolate got wind of my green Valentine’s Day post from last week and then got in touch with me. They were interested in having me include Green & Black’s in my Valentine’s Day roundup, though, obviously, it was too late. Nonetheless, they shipped me about a dozen candy bars of all of the different Green & Black’s flavors–mostly because I’d told them that I haven’t been a huge fan of the brand, ever since someone had given me a bar of the coffee flavor. Hey, me loves the coffee and me loves the chocolate, but me didn’t love the Green & Black’s coffee-chocolate combination.

OK, so now I’ll eat my words–after I eat some more Green & Black’s chocolate. While it’s disappointing that this chocolate doesn’t come in a tradiational heart-shaped box for Valentine’s Day, the taste of the flavors beyond the aforementioned coffee flavor (blech) more than makes up for packaging. Let’s just put it this way–my daughters recently picked up Girl Scout cookies from their friends, and this weekend chose to eat the Green & Black’s milk chocolate bars over Thin Mints. I’ll be heading out to Target soon to pick up more of these milk chocolate bars, including a couple of the almond ones for me!

* World’s Best Stain Remover Ever

When it comes to stains on my clothing, I’m a bit obsessive about getting them out. Maybe it goes back to my frugal roots, where you had to get as much wearing out of each article of clothing before you could toss it in the rag bin. Also, since I buy most of my kids’ clothing, I know how much I’ve paid and I’m not going to let one bloody knee or chocolate-stained top render a piece of clothing a rag.

When my kids were really little, I used Biz as a stain-remover. I’d fill a bucket with Biz and water, mix, and then soak the clothes. It did a pretty good job of getting out food and diaper-overload stains. Eventually, I graduated to Zout stain remover, after a friend raved about how it worked. Well, Zout was no Shout, and neither did a great job getting out things like mud stains. (Where we live our soil is red clay, and let me tell you, once red clay gets on your clothes, there’s no getting it out.) My fall-back stain remover–or should I say stain brightener–has always been bleach. But given its caustic nature, bleach is only good on tough articles of clothing and ones that are white. Plus, now that I’m trying to live a greener life, I try to avoid using bleach all together.

Recently I wrote a story about greening your household chores, and one of the tips I included was using borax as a stain remover. Before that piece I wasn’t really familiar with borax, except from the Fab jingle I remember as a kid: “Fab, I’m glad, there’s lemon-freshened borax in you.” But once I was researching my story, I figured I’d give borax a go, and wow, am I glad that I did.

For nearly any stain my kids can create these days, all I need to do to get them out is wet the article of clothing, sprinkle some borax on it, rub a little and toss in the laundry. There’s no having to let it sit overnight or soak in a bucket. Just sprinkle, rub, wash and voila, stain is gone. (The borax people are not paying me to say this.) Blood, dirt and chocolate don’t stand a chance now that I’m armed with borax. And what’s best is it’s a green laundry cleaner and cheap, too–I can get a 76-ounce box of 20 Mule Team Borax at my local ShopRite for only $2.99.

* When You Can’t Recycle, Burn, Baby Burn

I’ve mentioned many times in the past how my current trash hauler does not take paperboard of any kind with my recycling. Now that it’s winter time, I’m not stressing out too much about this anymore. That’s because I’ve discovered that paperboard and cardboard make excellent fire starters or fire enhancers. Along with used newspaper and some kindling I’ve picked up around the yard, I can get a really good roaring fire going by tossing in empty boxes of crackers, pasta and cereal. Perhaps it’s blasphemous even to be encouraging use of a fireplace, but I think it’s a whole hell of a lot better to burn up this excess cardboard than to toss it in a landfill.

Stay tuned in the future for more random green thoughts.

For most people, the three Rs stand for reading, writing and ‘rithmatic (even though the 2nd and 3rd “r” aren’t “rs” at all). These days, though, the three Rs are all about reduce, reuse, recycle.

It’s easy to remember this green mantra, thanks to Jack Johnson‘s song “The Three Rs,” which I believe appeared on the Curious George soundtrack. If you aren’t familiar with that song, check it out it out in this YouTube segment.

I may include this song in an event I’m planning for my daughter’s middle school, which will be a recycling Olympics of sort, to help students understand the basics of recycling (separating paper from plastic, for example) and why it’s critical these days. There will be races and trivia questions and more. This is based on a similar kind of event that a Minnesota elementary school recently held as part of their fundraising efforts. Since my daughter’s middle school has a new environmental club, I’m hoping they’ll provide great ideas as well.

If you’ve got any great ideas to share with me for this event, I’d love to hear them.

You know that old saying that goes something like, “I put my arm in my sweater, and my mother’s hand came out?” Yeah, well, it’s happening more and more these days.

I started sounding like my mother when I began insisting that my children write their own handwritten thank-you notes after Christmas and birthdays. They’re not always timely in getting these notes out, but at least their getting them done.

As I’d posted in an earlier blog, I’m encouraging my children to wear their jeans more than once to save on doing laundry. (They’re still having a hard time with the ick factor, so I’ve been secretly folding their in-the-laundry jeans and putting them back in their drawers, as if they’d been washed. Shh!) This was something my mother encouraged me to do as a kid, despite my protests about the ick factor, too. As a grown-up I’ve grown used to wearing jeans enough days in the row that my husband and I joke that by the time I’m ready to wash them, they could stand up on their own. But, hey, if they’re not noticeably dirty, why waste the washing machine water?

And I’ve really come full circle now that we’re going to start composting, something my mother has done since I was a child and still does to this day.

We quasi-composted in our old house, in that we used our lawn clippings to “feed” the flower beds and vegetable gardens. Nothing like rotting grass to create rich soil. But our neighborhood association didn’t allow full-blown composting. (They also didn’t allow laundry lines, chain link fences, and metal playsets.) Tomorrow I’m going to pick up a composting bin, thanks to a post asking for one on my local Freecycle listserve.

Yeah, I used to own a composting bin, as I’d written about here, but I foolishly threw it out with the trash. (How contradictory is that–something made for recycling ended up in a landfill. Oh, the irony, the horror!)

We’ve already begun preparing for our new composting plan by tossing food scraps (no meat or dairy, mind you) into an oversized ice cream bucket that we saved from a recent birthday party we’d hosted. We’ve almost filled the two-gallon bucket to the brim with banana peels, egg shells, cucumber skins, and apple cores so that bin couldn’t get here soon enough. And soon enough, I hope, we will be creating fertile soil for our gardens and significantly reducing the amount of trash we create in a week.

When my first book came out, I learned something that many authors, in the throes of writing their terrific tome, don’t consider: when it comes time to get the word out about your book, it’s up to you, the author, to do as much promotion as you can. Once I discovered that my publisher’s publicity deparment wasn’t going to be doing the PR legwork for me, I turned to another book to help me with the task of promoting my book. The book I used was Guerilla Marketing by Jay Conrad Levinson.

Written for the small-business owner that is looking to raise his company’s profile, this book offered many media tips that were applicable to me, a book author. It talked about sending out timely press releases whenever there was a national news story that you could somehow spin to be relevant to your business, and it also reminding media-minded folks to get in the habit of writing letters to the editor of your local paper about issues that were important to you, relevant to your business (or in my case, my book’s topic), or that were in response to an article the paper had run.

I recently recalled Levinson’s “letter to the editor” advice when I was feeling frustrated that I couldn’t recycle carboard and cereal boxes in my home. I figured that it was time to air my grievance to the world via letters to the editor. Yes, I was trying to get this issue off of my chest and maybe shame the local garbage companies into stepping up their recycling efforts. At the same time I was hoping that someone might read my letter to the editor and offer a solution I hadn’t conseridered.

Off went those letters to the editor to three local papers, and a few days later someone called me. It wasn’t my trash company, to apologize for their lousy recycling service, and it wasn’t another company trying to get my business. It was an ordinary citizen calling.

This person had read my letter to the editor and wanted to let me know about the local trash company she uses–one that I had never heard of, because it is so small–that not only recycles nearly everything you could put out at the curb but allows its customers to earn points based on how much they recycle. Customers can then redeem these points as gift certificates to local businesses.

The customer reward program is run through Recyclebank, a Philadelphia based company that created this notion of incentive-based recycling. This idea was right up my alley. It would allow me to recycle nearly everything I’d hoped I could recycle–glass, paper, aluminum, plastic, cardboard, cereal boxes–and earn, basically, free stuff. What frugal and green person wouldn’t love this?

Happy ending to my saga, right? Wrong. The small local company that works with Recyclebank does not serve my town. So I’m still stuck my regular trash company and my on-going quest to figure out ways not to toss my cardboard and cereal boxes into the garbage.

Maybe my next act of guerilla marketing will be to wait and see if my local papers ever write about Recyclebank. Then I can write another lettter to the editor. This time I can talk about how it’s such a shame that big trash companies like the one I use don’t participate in this innovative program. Perhaps that will shame them into finally changing their recycling ways.

It’s hard to believe it, but two months ago today, we closed on our dream house–and moved in. What’s not hard to believe is that, two months later, we are still living among the boxes. Little by little we are trying to unpack and re-sort our personal belongings so that they make some kind of sense in our new house. As we finish with a box, we toss it down the basement. Only problem is this morning I tried to get down to the basement but could barely open the door. If rabbits left alone multiply like crazy, then the boxes that we’ve left alone in our basement have been multiplying as well. Or is it true that we actually used hundreds of UHaul moving boxes for our move? Probably the latter.

With today being garbage day, I thought I’d break down some of these boxes and put them out with the trash. Why out with the trash? Well, our garbage company BFI/Allied Waste does not recycle cardboard of any kind–not even the cereal box variety–so I have to throw this stuff out. I’ve got it on my grand to-do list to figure out exactly why this company won’t take cardboard in recycling when our old company, Waste Management, at our old house did. Stay tuned on that mission. Our local school district participates in the Abitibi Paper Retriever Recycling Program, but they won’t recycle my cereal boxes and other paperboard there either.

Anyway, green got the best of me and I thought, wait there’s got to be a better way to get rid of these boxes without contributing to landfills. And there is. Craigslist. God bless Craigslist.

If you log onto Craigslist and visit the “For Sale” section, you’ll see all kinds of things that people are selling. (I’d blogged earlier about using Craigslist to sell unwanted items before our move.) However, I wasn’t interested in selling these boxes. I just want someone to come by, take them off my hands and, hopefully, reuse them. So I listed what’s called a “curb alert” in the “free” part of the For Sale section, and added the specifics of how many boxes, what size, and where and when people can find them (after 5 today in front of my house). Later today I’ll be schlepping these boxes out to the curb, and I hope that by nightfall, someone will have come by to take them away and reuse them.