Gimme 5

Are you as annoyed as I am when you do everything in your power to recycle but your recycling center won’t take the #5 plastics that are all too often the choice of manufacturers? I also have some prescriptions which I fill regularly and have been stock piling those little #5 plastic bottles hoping to be overcome with a particularly clever creative use for them rather than toss them.

 

Well I finally came across Preserve Products. I don’t know why I didn’t know about them sooner but I’m glad I do now. Go to PreserveProducts.com to see what they are doing. Preserve products are made from 100% recycled plastics and 100% post-consumer paper. I love what they are creating, or should I say re-creating?

But the best news for me was their Gimme 5 program. They know that a lot of communities don’t have recycling capabilities for the #5 plastics. No problem. Their Gimme 5 efforts have made it possible for everyone to recycle those pill bottles, butter tubs, yogurt cups, hummus tubs and other food containers.

 

There are two methods to Gimme 5.

 

1 - You can drop off clean #5 plastics at participating Whole Foods stores. The Preserve Products website has a state by state listing of the participating Whole Foods stores. If you live near a Whole Foods store that isn’t yet involved, make a suggestion that you want them to get with the program.

2 - If you don’t live near a Preserve Gimme 5 location you can send them directly to Preserve Products.

 

Send Gimme 5 shipments to:

Preserve Gimme 5
823 NYS Rte 13
Cortland, NY 13045

 

If you have any questions about the Gimme 5 program or have a large shipment you’d like to send, call them at 888-354-7296.

 

Here’s a note from Preserve Products about the impact of shipping your #5 plastics to them:

 

“Before starting the mail-back Gimme 5 program, we wanted to make sure that we were taking a positive step for the environment. We produced a single factor Life Cycle Assessment to analyze the impact of the Gimme 5 program. The results showed the benefits of keeping #5 plastics out of landfills and remaking them into new products outweigh the environmental impacts of shipping them back to us. We hope that the success of our program will help convince local recyclers of the value of taking #5 plastics back in more communities across the US.”

 

Finally a solution for a problem that has been bugging me for a long time.