So, you’re ready to purchase a new ecomower but you still have your old gasoline powered rotary mower sitting in your garage, the shed, your basement, or yard. What in the world should you do with it? Do you sell it? Should you give it away? Maybe you should take it to the dump or the transfer station? Letting your old lawn mower take the long journey to a landfill – or for that matter allowing it to be shipped overseas to some other landfill is a BAD idea. You’re buying an ecomower to help the environment, right? Why would you throw your old one away? If your gasoline powered lawn mower is ready to die and you can’t donate it, sell it, or give it to a friend, why not just recycle it!!

Recycling old lawn mowers is not an easy task and it can be difficult to find a local recycling center. For this reason, we have teamed up with Earth911.com to provide you with an extensive database of lawn mower recycling centers across the United States. Simply use the widget below and it will point you towards your nearest lawn mower recycling center. It is that easy!!

Lawn Mower Recycling Tool:

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Earth911 delivers actionable local information on recycling and product stewardship that empowers consumers to act locally, live responsibly and contribute to sustainability.

Reduce

Waste reduction is the process and the policy of reducing the amount of waste produced and ultimately disposed. Waste reduction or waste minimization, also known as source reduction, is simply reducing waste at its source. In the waste management hierarchy the most effective policies and processes are mentioned first. Waste minimization is also strongly related to efforts to minimize resource and energy use. The fewer materials used for the same production output means that less waste is produced. Waste minimization may require knowledge of the production process, product life cycle analysis (the tracking of products and their environmental impact from material extraction to their return to earth) and detailed knowledge of the composition of the waste stream. In waste management, product life cycle analysis is often referred to as a cradle-to-grave analysis.

The main sources of waste vary from country to country. Household waste constitutes a relatively small proportion of all waste in any country.

Reuse

When you use an item more than once, it is called reuse. Conventional reuse is where an item is used again for the same function, like when you refill a coffee cup instead of throwing it in the trash. It is also reuse when an item is reused for a different purpose, like when you use a 2-liter soda bottle as a seed-starter greenhouse.

Reuse helps the planet, but it also saves money. In many countries, this savings was not considered beneficial enough to forego the convenience of disposable products. Today’s consumer is becoming more aware of environmental concerns and this awareness is gradually changing business and government policies, and consumer attitudes about what the convenience of a disposable society is really costing us.

Recycle

Recycling is the processing of making used items into new raw material. Recycling conserves our natural raw material resources, and typically uses much less energy. Saving energy means that smokestack emissions of greenhouse gas and other pollutants like mercury are reduced at the power plant, and our energy sources are not depleted as quickly. Recycling is critical to today’s waste management programs.

Recyclable materials can be generated anywhere, and nearly anything is recyclable. They include paper, aluminum, glass, road surfaces, scrap metals, and all forms of plastics. Even food and lawn waste can be recycled. Fryer oil can be made into bio-diesel fuel, some plant products can be fermented into ethanol fuels, and some can be composted into fertilizer, or reduced in size to be used as mulch.

Recyclables need to be sorted and separated into material types before processing into new raw materials. Contamination with other materials affects the value and usefulness of the material to be recycled. This sorting can be performed either by the waste generator or the recycling facility.

The same is true of household recycling programs, and these can be broken down into two basic groups. 1) Curbside collection: where consumers leave recycling containers they place outside their property to be collected by a recycling vehicle. The materials can be either “source-separated” by the consumer into separate containers or commingled in one container to be separated at a Materials Recovery Facility (MRF) and 2) A “drop-off” program, where the consumer takes the recyclable materials to facilities where they are separated based on material type for further processing.

React

The “Three R’s” above outline what you can do to help preserve natural resources and protect the environment. With climate change and going green in the news daily, the list of steps everyone of us can take to help our planet is continually growing. React, obviously, is the next step. Conscientious Earth citizens have the ability to learn about the right things to do. After you learn, get out of your chair and actually do something about it: React! Make today the day YOU start to do something about it.