Most curbside recycling programs are great for everyday household items like paper, glass jars, cardboard boxes, and plastic containers but what about those not so common items.

Items like computers, light bulbs, calculators, eyeglasses, tennis shoes, paint, toilets, clothes hangers, Christmas lights, and torn jeans. Items that most curbside recycling programs won’t take but that you don’t want to just throw away. For those kinds of items check out Earth911.com.

At the top of Earth911.com home page are two boxes; what do you have and where are you. Type in the item you want to recycle and your zip code. Up pops a list of locations where you can take your item for recycling. How easy is that!

Companies are finding all kinds of ingenious ways to use recycled materials; turning denim into insulation, making purses from plastic bottles,   building running tracks from shredded tennis shoes. The possibilities seem endless.

So before you throw something a way, take a moment to see if Earth911.com can find a location near you that will recycle it instead. You never know what someone can turn your broken candle holders into.

Have you ever used Earth911.com to locate a recycling center near you? If so, tell us what you recycled and how you liked the site.

You can find more little green tidbits like this one at Lena’s blog Over Coffee – the green edition .