1000 Flowers for the Planet - #470 Recycle Writing Pens
How many pens do you have in your household? If you’re like me, you have
dozens of them. I don’t recall ever having to purchase a pen – they just seem
to appear – so I use one at a time in an endeavour to actually use all the ink in that pen before throwing it
away and moving on to the next pen. And there’s the rub – “throwing it away”. A
greater majority of pens are made from plastic, hence they are made from
non-renewable resources, including fossil fuels. When they’re thrown into
landfill they will stay there for 1,000 years. This is a senseless use of
valuable and finite resources. Plastic can be recycled, but in Australia, if
you put a plastic pen into your recycling bin it will still end up in landfill.
Here, yet again, the UK is a leader in that it recycles pens – they are turned
into hard plastic items such as bins and garden furniture. UK readers can find
out more at: [www.terracycle.co.uk]. In
the USA there is an artist who has glued 10,000 used pens to his car, the
Mercedes Pens, as a way of highlighting the problem of pens going to landfill.
Check him out at [www.penguyart.com] and
then see what you can do to reduce
the problem of pens going into landfill.
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