Recycling by Mail

When I logged on to my home page just now, the yahoo article listed was "Recycling By Mail". I thought, awesome! An excellent resource for my blog.
Here is the link: http://green.yahoo.com/blog/the_conscious_consumer/19/recycling-by-mail.html The article is written by Lori Bongiorno.

Apparently there are many nontraditionally recyclable items that you can put in the mail and that particular company will recycle those items. For instance Nike makes athletic fields from athletic shoes. Patagonia recycles clothes. "Recycline's Preserve Gimme 5 program collects clean plastic containers that have a #5 stamped on the bottom (yogurt cups, ketchup bottles, sour cream containers, and more). Recycled plastic is transformed into razors, bowls, and many other cool products (that you can also send back when you're done with them)."

I was amazed there were these options but then I got down to the comments. Most people felt they would be taken advantage of to have to pay to send these items to be recycled. Most posters felt it was much cheaper to just throw the old, unwanted stuff away. I think only one or two people even suggested donating to Goodwill or similar. With a short sighted mentality such as that, it makes it challenging for those of us who don't want the world to turn into the environment from the movie "Wall-e". But it also brings up the question, how can we make recycling (producing less garbage) a feasible thing for everyone?