Just when you finally figured out that the three point-chasing-the-tail arrows means “recycle” along comes a whole bunch more terms without the helpful arrows.
They are (drum roll): pre-cycle, free-cycle, up-cycle, down-cycle and e-cycle.
What does it all mean? California News Service's Lori Abbott turned to Amy Hock of Metro Waste Authority, a 40-year-old, Des Moines, Iowa-based independent government agency that manages waste in the buckeye state's center.
The breakdown is after the jump . . .
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Pre-cycling: Buying no more than you'll use up. (Pound sand, Costco!)
Free-cycling: Giving items away instead of throwing them away. (Something San Clemente may make more difficult tonight.)
Up-cycling:
Creating useful items from recycled materials. (So homeless people
making shelter out of recycled boxes have been up-cycling, not simply
surviving.)
Down-cycling: Reusing a product for a different
purpose so it does not wind up in a landfill. (Guess this means amateur
guitarists who staple used egg cartons to their garage walls to muffle
the sound have been down-cycling while down-stroking all these years.)
E-cycling: Recycling electronics. (Don't forget to strip mine them of your passwords and Social Security numbers first, Mr. Gates.)
Hock
says any of the above “cycles” can be used at home, school or the
office to keep materials out of landfills. Great. But what's the term
for recycling an exercise cycle next to your bed into a clothes hangar?
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.