Make Money: Recycle

Good day followers,

Today we will be looking into making money through the act of recycling.

How to do it:

In many states, recycling is a process that involves loving mother Earth so much that you want to pay some company to come take the recycling products you've saved from the curb on a day that usually follows trash day. This presents a problem when you think about trying to actually make money off of it rather than paying someone to take them. So how do you go about it?

Lucky enough, some states bridge this gap for you. If you currently live in a state that has a bottle bill, the state will actually pay you 5-10 cents per bottle for you to bring them to one of many recycling centers. When you do the math, this can quickly add up to some serious cash. I was one of the lucky kids when I was growing up because I lived in one of these states. Whenever I needed cash, I would go to any park that was nearby and bring a nice big trash bag to fill up. This requires no money to do so there is no bar that limits anyone from doing it. If you collect the plastic bottles that are worth 10 cents rather than the 5 cent cans, you can make good money in a very short amount of time. Any park that has ball fields is almost guaranteed to have these bottles all over as sports teams are chalk full of them. If you collect 100 of the 10 cent bottles, you've already got ten dollars. In fact there were days when I was younger that I would spend an hour at the park and walk away with 20-40$ because each trash can would have hand fulls of bottles that I could grab at a single time.

If you don't know if you live in a bottle bill state, simply check the website - bottle bill.

If on the other hand you live in a state that doesn't have a bottle bill, you'll have to get a little more inventive. A great way to make some side cash by recycling in a state that doesn't have a bottle bill is to find metals to recycle and bring them to a scrap yard for cash out. The difficult part about this is that most people don't have a good idea as to what metals are expensive and which ones aren't worth much of your time. An easy trick to get around this without much knowledge is to bring a magnet with you when you are searching for scrap. If the magnet sticks to the metal, you've got a less valuable piece of metal. If it doesn't, you've got a pretty sizable return on your hands and you should bring it in if at all possible. You can find scrap metal in all places but a good tactic for finding it is to browse your city. If you find a home that is being renovated, try talking to the owners of the property. Offer to demo some of whatever their upcoming project is in return for being able to take the metal and gain on the recycling profits. That way they get some of their work done for them and you make a profit in cashing in the metal. If on the other hand you're in the country and there aren't as many home renovations around or places are few and far between, try searching for land that appears to be used for hunting or otherwise. A lot of large open land seems to be a magnet for owners to dump their metal or other house hold items in. Offer to dispose of it for them after finding out who the owners are and bring it in for the profit.

Lastly, if you have old clothes, corks from wine bottles, or even an old phone laying around that you no longer use, you may be sitting on some easily available recycling cash. This is especially true of phones. It's not legal to throw a phone away because of the material it's made out of. This means that many websites are available that will pay you good money for the hardware that's inside of them. Cash in on this! You will probably never use that old phone ever again anyway. As for the corks, try selling them on a peer to peer site such as Ebay or Etsy. You may not think they're valuable at first but there are many an artist out there that would love to turn them into their next project. Finally, your old clothes. If you're like me, you only try to clear out your closet of old stuff maybe once a year. If that's the case, you've got a lot of unused cash to tap into. Used clothing stores, swap meets, and even Ebay would love to buy your old clothes. Give it a try the next time you're thinking about tossing your old clothes or donating them.

**Note: if you normally donate your old clothes because you want to help people, you can still sell your old clothes and then turn the profits into things you can donate that are in better condition such as new pairs of socks (one of the most asked for items by homeless persons in my area).

I hope that this provided some insight into ways that we can all make more money by recycling. Take care everyone,

-DM