Plenty Magazine answers the question about how to recycle plastic store gift cards once they’re used. Before answering that question though, let’s have a look at what the cards are made of.

A few companies are using cards made of a corn-based material called Mirel, from Metabolix. These cards are actually biodegradable, so when they’re all used up just throw them in your green composting bin! Major retailers using this include Target, REI, Borders and Wal*Mart. Hopefully others will join this list and use bio-degradable plastics (it would be nice to see banks doing the same with their cards too).

Unfortunately, most of the plastic cards out there are made of PVC (polyvinyl chloride) a toxic chemical that is not usually accepted in your recycling bin. They’re pretty small though, so throwing them in the garbage can’t cause much harm can it? Well, you’re right, individually each card is pretty small, but there’s a lot of them out there. Each year 75 million pounds of PVC finds its way into US landfills. That’s a lot of PVC, so read on after the jump to find out what you can do to avoid adding to that mountain of toxic waste.

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Plasma gasification machines turn your trash into fuel (e.g. hydrogen, ethanol or methanol) and an inert glass product that can be used to build roads, or turned into other construction products.

Sound too good to be true? Well, it gets better. The amount of energy that can be generated from the fuel produced is actually greater than the amount of energy it takes for the machine to process the garbage. So, not only does this prevent waste from going into landfills, and provide fuel and raw materials for construction, if used to produce electricity, it generates more energy than the process uses.

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Over at Make GREEN Come True they have a list of three surprising things that can be recycled:

1. Shoes: Nike’s Reuse-a-Shoe Program will turn old athletic shoes into new playgrounds and basketball courts. They do also point out that if the shoes still have some life left in them, then donating them so somebody can use them as shoes is probably a better idea.

2. Glasses: Not the kind you drink out of (although those can also be recycled), but the kind you wear to improve your vision, or just to look cool (sunglasses). Make GREEN Come True gives a couple of places where you can donate old glasses so that they can be reused (so, technically, this is not recycling, but we’ll let them off since it is better).

3. Batteries: This one shouldn’t have been a surprise really by now. At the very least, I hope most people now know not to throw them into the landfill (via their household waste). Many places now take used batteries back for recycling.

I have three more surprising things that can be recycled:

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Here’s an amazing idea, and it came from watching sea otters suffering in the 1989 Valdez oil spill! Phil McCory, a hair stylist in Huntsville, Alabama, noticed while watching reports on the environmental impact of the oil spill that the otters’ dense fur sucked up the oil and held on to it. That got him wondering whether human hair would do the same thing, so he set up an experiment using hair cuttings from his salon, a pair of his wife’s pantyhose and his son’s paddling pool to see whether he could remove oil from water using human hair. Miraculously, it worked, and the OttiMat™ was born.

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Here’s a really cool idea… bags and accessories made from candy wrappers, gum wrappers and soda bottle labels. The folks over at Nahui Ollin are the creators of these unusual looking bags. The wrappers are not being reclaimed from the garbage, but are rejects from the factory that would otherwise have been sent straight to the landfill, unused. A bag can contain as many as 4,000 wrappers, and take as long as four days to create.

In addition to the multi-coloured TuttiFrutti shown, they also offer Barcode, Silver and Black for many of the bags and accessories. Need something larger than the tote shown above? Check out the larger overturned tote. Or how about a pocket planner with a unique cover or a cell phone case.

Here’s a really simple way you can make a difference: next time you go shopping, take reusable bags with you instead of using those free plastic bags that the supermarkets hand out (normally in pairs). If you forget the bags, you can still avoid the plastic in many places by asking for paper bags (just remember to reuse or recycle them - I use them for my kitchen food scraps and then throw the whole thing into the composting bin).

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On Starbucks’ own website, in their ideas area, RoseByte has posted a suggestion that the worldwide coffee giant take some steps to help recycle the cups that they sell their cold drinks in every day. The clear plastic cups the cold drinks come in can be recycled, but there is nothing to encourage customers to do that, and there are no recycling bins in the Starbucks stores.

One of the big differences I noticed in the UK was that the Starbucks stores (and other coffee chains like Caffe Nero) used china cups and plates when you say that you’re staying in the store to enjoy your coffee and cake. Why isn’t this more common in the US too? Vote for this idea too.

But to be fair, it is not just Starbucks that could do better in this regard. I suspect that the amount of waste generated by McDonald’s customers is just as high, if not higher. McDonald’s has a recycling page on its website, but again all the projects are outside the US.

[Thanks to PlanetGreen for the pointer.]