By Steven Davies, Healthy Planet Columnist

Yes, it’s that time of year again. No, not Thanksgiving. First up is America Recycles Day, also known as National Recycling Day. America Recycles Day is November 15^th, Thanksgiving is of course, the fourth Thursday of the month. For many it may be a day easily forgotten while for me, it’s the day that comes after my birthday.

It was first celebrated as Texas Recycles Day in 1994 as the idea of Kevin Tuerff and Valerie Davis, who were employees of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. Since then, the number of people who recycle have grown. In 1960, it was 6 percent. The most recent figures show it to be around 35 percent.

So, you’re probably asking yourself, how can I get involved? To find out what’s happening here in Missouri, you can go over to the Missouri America Recycles Day website. For a look from the national level, visit the United States Environmental Protect Agency’s website. There you can also find what to do at home, school, work and in your community.

Of course, in addition to calling your local city hall to find out what they’re doing, you can also offer to volunteer to work at a local recycling event or even just learn what is recyclable, from plastics to paper to electronics, and where you can recycle it.

Now while I’ve talked often about the three R’s of reducing, reusing and recycling in the past, if you do go over to the Missouri/America Recycles Day website, you’ll also find a few more R’s to add. They include Rethinking as in “do I need that”, Refusing as in “refusing to use plastic bags” and use your own bags instead and Repurpose as in “finding a new use for something you already have” instead of throwing it away.

Whatever you do, take the day to add to what you already do in regards to recycling to your list. As I and others are fond of saying, we only have one planet. After all, we don’t do it for ourselves, we do it for the next generation like myself, I do it for my kids. If that’s not enough, the EPA is hoping we increase our goal to 50 percent by 2030. For Recycling questions please email me at thprecycler@yahoo.com

This entry was posted on Friday, October 31st, 2025 at 6:39 pm and is filed under November 2025. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.