Happy Earth Day! I hope you are spending the week recycling, reducing waste, and reusing products.  I recently noticed a poster with 2 more “R’s”– rot, and replace.

I’ll continue to address the “rot” with some upcoming composting posts.  “Replace” is as simple as replacing your old shower heads with low-flow water heads,  replacing your light bulbs with some energy efficient florescent bulbs, or even replacing your current cleaning products with some gentler, non-chlorinated product.

Of course, here at eCycle Group, we believe that you can accomplish 4 out of 5 by signing up for our recycling program, sending in your used printer and toner  cartridges, and replacing those empty ink containers with our recycled ink cartridges.

With all the time we save you with our easy online program, you can spend more time outside in the garden with your compost pile.  Hunh– I guess we can accomplish all 5!

Happy Earth Day!

Kathy Kelly is a 39-year-old single mother who works as a law librarian for a law firm in Erie, Pennsylvania. The industrious recycler has created a handcrafted line of bags she calls “BookBags“  using  repurposed book covers from outdated lawbooks. We found her and her fabulous bags over at Twitter.

One of her tasks at her firm Knox, McLaughlin, Gornall & Sennett is keeping the legal reference books up-to-date. As laws change, the books are constantly being replaced: Sadly, most of them have no distributional value once removed from the library shelves. As a person with a concern for the environment, she was interested in recycling the old books, but discovered it was difficult to find a recycler who would even take books, especially hard-covered books.  After a great amount of effort she was finally able to convince one of the local recycling companies to take them, but she would have to remove the covers first.

United States Code Annoted

About two years ago, Kathy returned to work after a surgery and came back to discover a giant pile of mail that included volumes of updates.  One update, the United States Code Annoted (pictured here) included nine volumes covered in gorgeous maroon leather-like material.  She knew she would have to remove the covers to recycle the paper of the book, but it still seemed like such a waste of that beautiful fabric to throw it away (not to mention, creating plenty of garbage).  For a few months, she simply collected the book covers; she didn’t know what she was going to do with them, only that she would figure something out.

One day, in one of those “eureka!” moments familiar to many inventors, Kathy envisioned a small purse her mother had given her when she was younger, and started playing with the idea. » Read more