The Bangor Recycling Committee offer New Year’s Resolutions for recyclers:

1. Put reusable grocery bags in the front seat of your car to remind you to take them in to the store. Better yet, have a collection of tote bags that you keep in your car in a “bag of bags;” Hannaford’s will give you 5 cents credit for each bag you provide.

2. Never flush unused pills down the toilet. Return them to your pharmacy or mix them into a slurry with ripe garbage to send with your regular trash to PERC to be burned at 2200 degrees.

3. Go to post-Christmas sales and buy festive fabric really cheap. Make gift sacks and do away with wrapping paper forever.

4. Never shop with any company that sends you more than four catalogues per year. If they do, call and protest. If they persist, do your shopping online or someplace else. Tell them what you are doing and why.

5. Wedge your Christmas tree in your backyard so it won’t blow away. Scatter millet seed under it for the birds.

6. Save unused “return envelopes,” put a blank sticker over the address and use them for your own mail. Buy a supply of blank labels.

7. Give a compost bin as a present to yourself or someone else. Keep Bangor Beautiful sells great ones for $45. (990-1201). Google “compost bins” and you won’t lack for ideas.

8. Recycle only corrugated cardboard. (Currently Bangor does not have a market for boxboard and it is considered a contaminant.) Break down boxes so that no piece is larger than 3-feet-by-3-feet. If the recycling truck has to stop and do this for you it costs you — the city taxpayer — money.

9. Remove all polystyrene foam packing from boxes; it is a major contaminant. (If you have already broken down your boxes, this is a nonissue). Take your “peanuts” and other packing materials to a Packing Service, which you can find in the telephone book, and they will happily use them again.

10. Return your old cell phone to the store where you bought it. This keeps hazardous waste out of the landfill.

11. Currently Bangor recycles only No. 2 plastics. All other kinds are contaminants and have to be removed by hand. (It’s a shame Bangor can’t recycle other plastics, but that’s the nature of the current commodities market).

12. Bangor collects hazardous waste free of charge the third weekend of each October. Call 992- 4500 for information.

— Geoffrey Gratwick, Bangor Recycling Committee