With long days and plenty of sunshine, summer is the perfect time to tackle home renovations. Whether you’re upgrading a cottage on Kelowna’s beautiful Lake Okanagan or doing minor renos to your Kelowna South bungalow, summer house renovations create a lot of waste. That’s why it’s essential to recycle any of the unused materials that you can. Our team here at Kelowna Recycling have created this guide to help you do the right thing with these renovation discards!
Copper Wiring
Copper is the industry standard for electrical wiring in residential and commercial buildings. When you do your renovations this summer, consider recycling your copper wire. Not only is copper wire one of the most efficient metals to recycle, but recycled copper is also widely used to create new products in the electronics, transportation, industrial, communications, and plumbing industries.
Copper you can bring to us for recycling includes:
- Bare Bright Copper
- No. 1 Insulated Copper
- No. 2 Insulated Copper
- Copper tech cable/wire
Plumbing Fixtures and Pipes
From updating fixtures like faucets and shower heads to doing full kitchen remodels, changing up your kitchen and bathroom is a great summer renovation goal that will leave some valuable recyclables behind. Brass, an alloy of copper and zinc, is a common material used in fixtures, faucets, plumbing, and valves. Like other metal construction materials, it can be smelted and recycled into new products like musical instruments, plumbing fixtures, and decorative handles and knobs.
Types of brass that we will accept for recycling include:
- Yellow Brass
- Red Brass
- Irony/Dirty Brass Products
Lightbulbs
Summer in the Okanagan Valley is all about sunshine, and renovations are a great way to increase the amount of light in your home—so you get that summertime feeling any time of year! Many renovations include changes to light fixtures, relocating light installations, and swapping out low-efficiency incandescent light bulbs for LED or compact fluorescent bulbs. These home improvement projects will bring more light into your home, and leave you with a bunch of old bulbs. Consider recycling your old light bulbs to keep them out of the landfill.
Types of light bulbs suitable for recycling include:
- Older incandescent light bulbs
- Halogen, CFL & LED bulbs
- Fluorescent bulbs with mercury
- Lamps
