Messes are the markers of life, and in the summertime, life abounds. Children are home from school and there are farmer’s markets, weekend yard-sales and concerts. We travel, picnic in the park and look for the closest body of water to cool off in. Long summer days mean a lot of outside living. The food and drink on the tables we gather around find their way into our laps, brushed off on our jeans and wiped off surfaces, hands and faces.
The clothes and fabrics we live in are part of these messes, so laundry loads multiply. Changing out linens and curtains for the season, going through three outfits on a hot day, cleaning out suitcases of traveled clothes and beach towels are summer symptoms of staying clean and cool when life heats up. And though doing laundry can be a chore, it is satisfying knowing that fresh laundry is not that far away.
Operating from the helm of a company dedicated to eliminating the idea of waste, I believe it’s important that we view items like clothing with value. Investing in fewer, higher quality items that you can hand down and truly live in encourages repair and reuse, and inspires the desire to take care of them.
Cold wash, hand wash, line dry, tumble…While keeping the particulars of proper laundry top of mind, thinking about the environmental impacts of washing clothes become secondary. One of these impacts is the plastics of laundry detergent bottles. Though highly recyclable (all waste is technically recyclable, but I digress) when recycled together, #2 plastic laundry bottles and #5 caps often end up in landfills. This is due to the lack of a local facility or confusion about how to recycle.
With the plastics recovery rate for recycling holding at a stagnant 9 percent in the U.S., encouraging municipal recycling is the first line of defense to diverting waste from landfills and seeing these common household plastics to a second life.
Tide has launched a national laundry bottle recycling program with us at TerraCycle to make sure as many laundry bottles and caps are recovered for recycling as possible. Through the Tide Laundry Bottle Recycling Program, individuals are now able to use a free recycling database to learn whether they can recycle curbside or find a nearby drop-off location.
If a consumer does not live near one of the points listed on the database map and cannot recycle municipally, they can register themselves as a drop-off location for the community or recycle on their own from home using a free shipping label provided through the program. With this new database, consumers have nationwide access to a solution that will prevent these recyclables from entering the waste stream.
By encouraging recycling of any brand of laundry bottles and their caps, Tide makes laundry even cleaner by reducing impacts on the planet. For more than 25 years, the laundry care brand has put more than 25 percent recycled plastic in all of their North American detergent bottles. Today, they encourage recycling through this accessible, easy-to-use resource.
For more information about the recycling program and access to the free database, please visit: http://www.terracycle.com/en-US/brigades/tide