recycle more

This past weekend my son and I went to Phillipsburg to go curb shopping. City wide trash pick up and city wide yard sales on Saturday produced heaps of unwanted clutter on the curbsides there. We picked up quite a few useful items and many recyclables. My iron pile has grown considerably!
The trash truck was on our tail when we got to P-burg and it was a race to get what we could from the heaps of unwanted things before the trash guys put it in their large truck and hauled it to the landfill. I wish I had had a dump truck instead of just my van. We filled the van beyond capacity on the first street we stopped on! Then we got the boy’s pickup truck and parked it at the cafe and emptied the van and went back out collecting.
I now have two ‘new’ doors for the burned house (we are fixing it up to be livable again). I have a ‘new’ silk ficus tree, tons of iron castoffs… iron and steel are pretty much the same thing if you ask the junkman. They are somewhat interchangable. Though, cast iron and stainless steel are totally different things.
I got a yard fountain for my pond that if bought brand new would have set me back about 200 dollars. Two garden hose reels were found as well. There is just too much to list it all. We came home with the van packed to the gills and the truck loaded so much we couldn’t get the last metal shelf on even though we wanted to.
If the boy and I hadn’t had to go to Hutch the next day, we would have gone back to P-burg and got some moreof what the trash guys hadn’t got to yet.
As for recycling what we produce at home, that is going quite well. The paper box is full and the tin container for soup cans and such get filled regularly.
Curb side shopping is quite fun actually!

The can in the kitchen is almost full again even though it was just emptied last week. I put a bunch of junk in it earlier today. This has become a habit with the metals can in the kitchen.
After having discovered ATCs, I have recycled every chipboard box that comes into this house. If I can’t use it for ATCs it goes to my sister to use as kindling in her wood burning stove.
Still trying to figure out just what could be done with all that paper I still send to the landfill…we haven’t a recycling center in our neck of the woods and the landfill is the only place to send it to unfortunately. I do recycle some of the paper but there’s SO MUCH of it!
Still doing this though and that’s the goal…to recycle as much as I can.

Three people and no cans added to the metals can in the kitchen. Something wrong with that! How dang hard is it to rinse out a can when you’re cooking and whatever you’ve cooked came from a can? I don’t find that hard to do at all! I was gone from Tuesday evening till Friday evening this past week and there was NO NEW CANS put in the metals can in the kitchen while I was gone.
If those three kids are going to stay with me… they gotta learn that recycling is something that gets done at my house and they will have to abide by that rule!

I’m not sure just how much junk is out there at the moment…I haven’t been the one taking the trash out lately.
I do know the exercise bicycle that was in the junk pile is not there anymore. Aunt Sherry sold it some fella she knows for ten bucks! It was Ma’s though, not mine, so Ma got the ten bucks which is cool.

that contain fish are a bear to wash out for the recycling bin! I rinsed that can with water like I do with all cans that go in the recycling bin, but this one didn’t want to come clean easily! I had to ACTUALLY WASH the danged thing as opposed to simply rinsing it out! I almost just chucked it in the trash can but I didn’t. It had to be washed cause fish stinks anyway and if I hadn’t washed the danged thing, my kitchen would have smelled to high heaven by this afternoon!
Keep on keeping on with your reduction to the landfill!

I save envelopes that come in the mail. Envelopes of the bubble wrap variety, large manilla envelopes, odd sized envelopes and other envelopes that one may need but would have to go buy if one actually needed one. I never buy large envelopes, I simply use the ones sent to me in the mail. A large label placed over the address label already there does the trick to get it to your own recipient.

The art project executed today used one of those large padded envelopes. I always wondered what those things were padded with. Now I know…shredded paper.
My little friend, Brenton, who is five, and I made a book out of pictures cut from magazines glued onto blank copy paper. I let Brenton choose from ones already cut that were in my scrapbooking box. We had enough pictures for about eight pages.
I cut the envelope to the same size as the papers and taped more pictures to the outside of the envelope to hide the mailing label. We punched holes in the paper with a three-hole punch and threaded colorful green wire through the holes to hold the book together.
It was a grand success and I’m thinking highly of doing other versions of personalized books for my sisters for Christmas.
There are many, many ways to recycle many, many things. Think of something creative to turn trash into treasure!

so they are all in one place. I visited a junk yard this past week. Actually visited two of them… I saw quite a few containers that would have worked for my tin cans but they got baled along with the other metals in these junk yards.
Another can full of tin cans went out to the junk pile out on the point by the trash cans on Friday. Seems to work out that I fill that can roughly once a month. It’s just me accumulating those cans so that seems to be a reasonable amount of tin cans for a month…
The paper box beside the desk has been emptied twice since the last post. I got rid of a bunch of magazines this morning that I had been putting off reading and going through. I don’t throw all of my magazines away though, some I keep just cause they have useful information that I may need somewhere down the line.
The glass bottles don’t add up quickly these days. Seems manufactureres put everything into plastic containers these days instead of glass.
Sometime this week I am going to go hunt down my burn barrel (its somewhere around here… at Ma’s house I think…) and put it out in the junk pile to put aluminum cans into. I don’t burn things anyway. What can’t be recycled unfortunately gets hauled to the landfill.

I separated the metal pile into separate metals a couple weeks ago. That was a big job!!! Still not quite done with it. I’m going to call my friend and ask him to come look at my pile and tell me how much he thinks I can get for the whole thing from the junk man. My friend works for the junk man.
I think I’ll keep the copper till I get a bit more of it though as that pile is quite small and it wouldn’t pay to take it if there isn’t much there to sell.
The aluminum pile is quite large. I tossed out a couple of old lounge chairs, a twin bed with an aluminum frame (it was bent), and an old screen door. Not to mention the stuff I got from the dumpster at the bank.
The iron pile is biggest of all. I went through all my tins and got rid of a few of them that had rusted, were bent and dinged or were just not of any use to me anymore, i.e. lids missing and the like. I must find me a large container for all those tin cans though. They are running amok!
I would like to save glass containers too but I’ve nowhere to store them and have no idea where the glass recycling place might be. I know there is one in Wichita, but that’s an awful long way to travel to dispose of them. I do keep some glass, but most of it goes to the landfill, unfortunately.
Still plugging along though….

The paper bin by the desk in the livingroom is almost full again. That paper gets given to my sister for her wood burning stove in the wintertime. She uses it for kindling.
The newspapers are beginning to pile up. I keep them for paper mache projects and covering the table with when I do some messy craft project.
Another can full of tin cans went out the day before yesterday. More have been added to the can since then.
I had a yard sale the weekend before last and got rid of a lot things that I didn’t need nor want. The yard sale will be a continuing thing through fall and then we shall what’s left and see if it should continue through the spring and summer too. I have cleaned out the trailer house shed and now kinda know what is still out there. LOTS OF STUFF IS STILL OUT THERE!
I’m just plugging along on this goal and reaping benefits along the way.

I live in a small town…population somewhere around 1500 people, give or take a few. My oldest son likes to scan the dumpsters around town when he comes for a visit. We did that yesterday afternoon. There was nothing of importance in most of the dumpsters we checked out. The Farmer’s Bank yeilded our biggest find of the day. This is a refurbished building where the bank resides and they have been throwing away building material scraps for the last month or so. This was my second time raiding the bank’s dumpster. We got a very large sheet of aluminum siding, two five foot pieces of aluminum guttering and two corner joints of guttering also. There was a few lengths of conduit in that dumpster as well. Nextech’s dumpster gave us a long piece of coaxil wire (aluminum and copper). We discovered a metal chair frame in the docotor’s office’s dumpster.
All of this metal debris will go in the junk pile (as it grows larger and larger by the day!) and we will sell it to P’s Recycling when we get enough of one metal to sell to them. On my list of things to do today is to go out there and sort that junk pile into the seperate metals contained in the junk pile!
Every little bit helps people!