Q: Can we recycle empty canisters from small gas grills? If so, where?

—Brenda in Kearneysville, West Virginia 

A: Whether you're scrunched down in your crawl space soldering a pipe joint or in the High Sierra cooking up dinner on a stove, those cylinders are fine companions. But they can't legally be refilled (though some folks do it on the sly). You can recycle them, just not with other stuff, partly because they are a fire hazard. Contact your local solid-waste-management facility to make sure the canisters get disposed of properly. A major manufacturer of disposable cylinders, BernzOmatic, makes it easy for you to find waste mavens by typing in your zip code. 

An estimated 60 million cylinders are made each year. When they fizzle out, a vast majority, whose total weight would be around 30,000 tons, wind up in the dump, or worse, in the landscape. Fortunately, Yellowstone and several other national parks in the United States and Canada now have machines that extract any remaining propane gas from the cylinders and mash them to be shipped for recycling. Ingeniously, the machines salvage the propane, which in turn is burned to power the machines! 

Here's a better option: refillable cylinders that can be used over and over. They cost more but can save you money in the long run—as much as 80 percent of the cost of a disposable cylinder is the cylinder itself.