Our dear readers who live in the United States, specifically in the Northern Virginia and the District of Columbia, will be able to benefit Costa Rica by recycling their bicycles during the 2014 America Recycles Day later this week. Non-profit organization Bikes for the World is participating in a special campaign sponsored under the Keep America Beautiful umbrella, and they are working in conjunction with Fundacion Integral Campesina de Costa Rica (Spanish acronym FINCA). Here’s the official press release:

WASHINGTON, D.C. – “I Want To Be Recycled” is the theme of Keep America Beautiful’s 2014 America Recycles Day (ARD), which takes place annually on and around Nov. 15 throughout the country. America Recycles Day, in its 17th year, educates people about the importance of recycling to our economy and environmental well-being and helps to motivate occasional recyclers to become everyday recyclers.

America Recycles Day celebrates the benefits of recycling and provides an educational platform that motivates people to take action to recycle more and recycle smarter, influencing recycling behaviors at work, at home and on the go.

“When material is recycled, you’re ‘giving your garbage another life’ as it becomes something new and valuable,” said Jennifer Jehn, president and CEO of Keep America Beautiful. “For example, a plastic bottle can be recycled into new containers, t-shirts and fleece jackets, park benches, plastic lumber, and more. America Recycles Day can inspire people to reduce, reuse and recycle – and realize that recyclable materials have the potential to become something bigger.”

Keep America Beautiful is providing resources and supporting activities to thousands of grassroots events across the country. Here is a sampling of creative events taking place on and around ARD:

• In Arlington, Va., nonprofit Bikes for the World will donate its 100,000th bike to be reused for social good. Bikes for the World staff, volunteers and representatives from the EPA and KAB will attend a ceremonial loading of the 100,000thbike into a shipping container. The donated bikes will be shipped to Bikes of the World partner Fundacin Integral Campesina (FINCA Costa Rica), a rural micro-business program that distributes bikes to community groups that recondition and sell the bikes locally.
• Through Nov. 15, Malibu, Calif., and area residents can drop off polystyrene foam at Malibu’s City Hall where it will be collected and recycled by the environmental nonprofit Sustainable Surf and Marko Foam Inc. The material is used to make recycled surfboard blanks (and other products) to create more environmentally friendly surfboards as part of the Waste to Waves project.

This is what happens when nice people from the United States donated their old bikes to Costa Rica:

Our bicycles provide an additional source of capital to participating credit enterprises and, in addition, generate additional local employment through allowing members of individual groups to recondition the bicycles, earning a fair wage, and with each group selling bikes locally, providing affordable production-oriented transportation to enterprise members and others in the community, with any profit retained by the collective and reinvested in members’ businesses, enabling them to grow their individual income-generating operations.