ECO One Earth offers products made from recycled materials

The blue bin lugged to the street each week is full of recyclable items, but few know where they go from there.

Executive Director Gina D’Abella of ECO One Earth Products explains, “Typically, recyclables collected via residential curbside recycling programs are processed at Material Recovery Facilities or MRFs. The material is baled, sold and shipped to manufacturers that use those commodities for their products made from those recycled materials.”

Maricopa has their own MRF where certain commodities are processed, then used by ECO One Earth Products, a non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation. “The products that we actually manufacture at our facility are the hand-crafted glass products. We also use recycled metals (mostly copper) in a lot of our glass products,” D’Abella said. “An added bonus is that all products that are available are made solely in the U.S., which is an important factor to many people.”

ECO’s Web site notes, “In order for recycling to work, we must buy merchandise made from recycled content. In other words, if you are not buying recycled, you are not really recycling!”

ECO One Earth products will be available for purchase on Founders Day. “We will have the recycled wine bottle cheese plates, drinking glasses and wine chimes, as well as Treasured Trash wearable art jewelry and magnetic picture frames. One hundred percent of the profit from ECO’s One Earth Products sold during Founders Day will be used to help support all of ECO, Inc.’s non-profit environmental projects (mostly the Recycling Association of Maricopa),” said D’Abella.

All ECO One Earth products are available on the web at www.1earthproducts.com. “We were working with a Maricopa resident who convinced us to totally redo our ‘old’ site with great features, like uploading artwork. We were very excited and hopeful to finally have the site completed and begin marketing the new site. He made that part of the site ‘live’ last month, but, unfortunately, has not completely uploaded all of our products where that feature would be used. If you have been on the site, then you know that it is difficult to navigate without all of our products shown,” D’Abella explained.

Look for D’Abella on Founder’s Day, and learn more about Maricopa’s recycling and making Maricopa and the earth a ‘greener’ place.

Photo by Joyce Hollis