Where to recycle?

*Please feel free to correct me if there are any wrong information found*

Ok, this is delayed long enough. Soaking myself in animes and animes is turning out to be boring and making me feel useless. Frankly, the amount of stuff to deal with is kind of overwhelming (which is one of the reason why I'm soaking myself in animes) so I thought I'd start with something simple, also one of the questions contributed to the survey.

If you're too lazy to read everything below, you can just check out these 2 sites - NEA, SEC, for lists of places where recycling bins are located, where to recycle used batteries, print cartridges, printing hardware and computers.

Where do you find your recycling bins?

Actually if you click on the large "The Recycling Bean" icon on the sidebar, it would bring you to one of the National Environment Agency's webpages and from there you can navigate and find one closest to you. The website is actually very navigable.

Ok, to make it easier for you, this is the list of recycling bins in a Microsoft Excel file, provided on NEA's website. The thing is I don't know how accurate are the addresses of places they have provided, but why not walk past the areas in your housing estate and check it out? Do note that some places only have bins for one type of material like drink cans or paper.

You might be asking why don't we see these bins everywhere and why they might be in ulu places. A friend of mine gave me 2 reasons - firstly, there is the danger that people will throw stuff like cigarettes into the paper bins resulting in a fire (and this has happened before), secondly, people actually throw rubbish into these bins instead of recyclable items.

Where can we recycle used batteries?

On the same NEA webpage "The Recycling Bean" icon leads to, if you'd scroll down, is a list of places where you can recycle print cartridges, batteries (handphones' and others) as well as a list of places such as The Salvation Army, Cash Converters, Red Shield Industries Family Thrift Stores and other Thrift Shops, where you can drop off your assorted items like your furniture.

Yes, you can recycle your used Energizer/Eveready/Duracell/what-not-brand batteries.

Instead of referring to NEA's webpage for the list of places where you can deposit your batteries, I refer to this particular page of Singapore Environment Council's website. From what I know only Nokia Care Centres accept these batteries. What a friend of mine does is he fills two 1.5 litres bottles with batteries then heads down to deposit them at one go.

These Nokia Care Centres also accept, besides household batteries (as mentioned above), used/spent Nokia handphones, handphone batteries, and accessories. Only Nokia items, I suppose.

Nokia Care Centres:

1) Wheelock Place
501 Orchard Road
#03-03A
Wheelock Place
Singapore 238880
Tel: 6512 5778

2)Suntec City
No 3 Temasek Boulevard
#02-56/58/60
Singapore 038983
Tel: 6835 7537

3) Century Square
2 Tampines Central 5
#04-07/08
Singapore 529509
Tel: 6781 8914

4) Causeway Point
1Woodlands Square
#03-24/25/26 S
ingapore 738099
Tel: 6512 5779

5) Parkway Parade
80MarineParadeRoad
#B1-30/31/32
Singapore 449269
Tel: 6346 6589

As mentioned on the SEC website, Motorola also accepts their own handphone batteries, handphones, accessories and walkie talkies. Addresses can be found on the linked website.

Where can we recycle our used Print Cartridges, Printing Hardware and Computers?

1) You can sell them to your local karang-guni,
2) Several places from SEC website,
3) Through HP:

HP Supplies Recycling Programme - There are different proposed methods of returning original HP print cartridges for individuals, small businesses and public sector users.

For individuals (a.k.a us), original HP LaserJet and inkjet cartridges can be deposited into recycling bins like these,

at any of these retail shops or HP's main office itself:

Hewlett-Packard Singapore Pte. Ltd. (ATP-A)
HP Service Center
438A Alexandra Road Blk A #02-08
Alexandra Technopark (Lift Lobby 2)
Singapore 119967

HP also has a Hardware Recycling Programme which accepts "end-of-life HP and non-HP computing equipment like personal computer, laptop, computer monitor, handheld, notebook, server, printers, scanners, fax machine, digital camera, as well as associated external components such as cable, mouse and keyboards."

But if you are returning non-HP products, you need to have something to show that you have bought a HP product before. For more information, click on the hardware recycling link above.

I would like to end off this post with this thought:

Recycling isn't the answer to everything. Remember the other 2 Rs - Reduce and Reuse. Recycling uses more energy than you might think.