Most major cities in the US have curbside recycling programs, making it easy to recycle some paper, glass, plastic, and metal. But what about items that you can’t just chuck out with the weekly trash, like mercury thermometers, batteries, cellphones, or other potentially hazardous materials? There are a number of places you can take those items to recycle them — if you know where they are. And it turns out there’s an app for that.

iRecycle is an iPhone app that maintains a list of locations for recycling about 240 different materials. Just enter the type of material you want to recycle and iRecycle will spit out a list of places where you can drop it off.

As a number of people have pointed out in the App Store reviews for iRecycle, the app works best if you happen to be in a major city. But that’s largely because there are a probably more recycling drop off locations in big cities. But I gave iRecycle a test run and it seems to know the closest places to my house to drop off batteries and plastic shopping bags. So it does seem to work pretty well in my corner of Philadelphia.

You also might want to give a call to the stores or other drop off locations before hopping in your car and driving ten miles only to find out there’s been a mistake and you can’t actually recycle your 47 inch plasma TV at the library (but you might be able to at the nearest Best Buy).

But overall, iRecycle makes the job of finding a responsible place to dispose of your waste a lot easier.

You can download iRecyle for free from the iTunes App Store. And you can find more screen shots after the break.

via Mashable

Brad Linder

Brad Linder is editor of Liliputing and Mobiputing. He's been tinkering with mobile tech for decades and writing about it since...