Hello friends! My city has a great resource, the hard-to-recycle station, located inside an office building that houses several environmental organizations.
It has been a long time since I've dropped off there, so I discovered they no longer accept pens to recycle! Drat. I'll have to see if I can find another place for those. But otherwise:
Small e-waste (two old sonic sound big repeller things that started sparking, and a battery charger that stopped working).
4 toothpaste tubes.
12 lip balm tubes.
4 CFL bulbs.
17 (18? I added one) batteries.
2 cords from holiday lights.
Metric fucktons of kitty food pouches.
3 air purifier filters, 2 little and one big round one (to be honest, I wasn't sure about this one. They used to specifically say "air purifier filters," and that wasn't there, but they did have a section called "air care" so I put them there? But the things in the photo were like, air freshener things, so that might have been wrong. But the worker disappeared so I couldn't ask).
12 water purifier filters.
... all recycled! I brought the pens back home in case I could find another recycling place.
The lip balm (Burt's Bees) and toothpaste (Tom's of Maine) both advertise on their packaging that they can be recycled through Terracycle, but they didn't specify ONLY Terracycle-marked items on their bin, so maybe they take all kinds?
Anyway, you can tell by the large amount of things I amassed, that I haven't been there in ages. So it feels good to finally get that done. They also took printer cartridges and a few other categories I didn't have anything for.
Do you have a resource like this near you? You might ask on a neighborhood forum like Nextdoor or Facebook groups, that was how I found out about this place long ago!
Have a great day and thank you for reading! :)