From egg hunts, to the massive amounts of candy, to Peter Cottontail hopping around; there’s a lot for many of us to celebrate in the spring season. If we want this yearly celebration of rebirth to continue, then we need to take a hard look at how we’re marking the day, and how we’re cleaning up afterward.
From egg hunts, to the massive amounts of candy, to Peter Cottontail hopping around; there’s a lot for many of us to celebrate in the spring season. The sunny, warm days are here, and things are greening up everywhere you look. If we want this yearly celebration of rebirth to continue, then we need to take a hard look at how we’re marking the days, and how we’re cleaning up afterward. First, we need to talk about a major part of any spring celebration: the plastic eggs. Newsflash, there’s an extremely high chance that they can’t be tossed into your local recycling bins. Plastics 1 and 2 are widely accepted in most recycling programs. Items marked 3-7 are not, especially after markets dried up and many foreign countries stopped accepting shipments of the material from the U.S. That’s where the plastic eggs fall, in the plastics 3-7 range. If you’re lucky enough to have a place nearby to take them, that’s great. In many cases, the eggs and their packaging don’t have any markings at all to indicate what type of plastic was used. Sadly, the best advice is to reuse them or toss them in the garbage. MORE INFO: How to read plastic recycling symbols
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