recycle more

The town held an event for Earth Day, and we were able to meet the guy in charge of the city’s recycling. He answered a bunch of questions from us, and now we know where to take most of the stuff which was still going in the trash. Without curbside recycling, it takes a little effort but it’s worth it. Every week our herbie-curbie (trash can) is only about 1/4 full, and that’s mainly bathroom and cat trash. I look at the neighbors’ trash overflowing and it makes me confident that we’re doing well.

I save most of our magazines for a friend and take the ones she’s not interested in reading to the local retirement apartments. They have a table where you can drop off donations so I leave them up for grabs there.

I’ve gone to catalogchoice.org to decline most of the catalogs which were coming in the mail, but I still had a bag full after the holidays. The Wal-Mart in my parents’ town has a bin at the front of the store where you can drop magazines and catalogs for recycling. I dropped them off last week and commented to the greeter that I thought it was great that they were doing this.

It’s actually not too bad except when there’s ice everywhere and I can’t take the stuff to the garage for storage. I’ve noticed a dramatic decrease in the amount of stuff at the curb for the garbage men every week. If everyone did this, they could pick up trash every other week. Think of the money the town would save! Maybe I’ll send the mayor another email.

I sent an email to the mayor’s office who put me in contact with the city’s brand new recycling guy. He said that I could put all the steel cans in the bins with the aluminum and put all the paperboard with the newspapers. He confirmed that bottle caps shouldn’t go in the bins so I’m now saving those to use as filler in the bottoms of our flower pots next year. It’s really cut down on the amount of stuff actually going in the trash, and I still make just one trip to the recycling bins each week.

I’ve saved aluminum cans for years because the local recycling center will pay for them. It never made sense to throw away something of value. A couple of years ago I decided I wanted to save the newspaper and plastic too. The town has several bins where these can be dropped so we started collecting those. About once a month, the plastic bin is full and we take it downtown along with the newspapers. When I think that I was throwing away that much plastic and newspaper 12 times a year, I’m actually ashamed I wasn’t doing this sooner! While searching for recycling options for glass, I ran across a place that takes corrugated cardboard. So now we have a stack of that in the garage and take it in about once every two months. I still haven’t found a local glass recycler. I may have to see if anyone on freecycle can use all the jars. With all this, our trashcan is still about half full every week. I’d appreciate any ideas to increase the amount of recycling or reusing we can do.