make a smaller ecological footprint

Well, we had our first trip to the recycling center yesterday. We discovered (happily) that, contrary to what we had thought, we can recycle plastic bottles at the facility nearest to us. However, we decided that we are still going to work to reduce our consumption of bottled water, since it really drives up the price of groceries when we buy it and its not really neccessary to consume it.

I was also happy to find that the facility has a clothes donation facility at it as well. Next time we take our stuff in I will have to remember to bring my donations down as well.

We’ve been sorting out a lot of our recyclable materials for a week now. We’ve also stopped consuming water in plastic bottles (though we still have a case of it sitting in the house, for emergencies, I guess). We are using Britta pitchers and refillable bottles instead – glasses are risky, especially at night, since one of our kitties likes to drink from them and the other likes to knock them over!

So far we are recycling: glass, tin cans, aluminum cans, and magazines. We really need to start recycling paper as well, since we go through so much of it. I guess I just need to set up a bin and then use it. Really not that hard.

We haven’t yet amassed enough recyclables to make the trip to the recylcing center, but I imagine we will have to do that in a week or two.

In other news, there was a special on some local, low-budget news program about Chicago’s horrible recycling program – it convinced my boyfriend that I am not insane for being suspicious of the blue-bag program (in which trash and recyclables are mixed together in the same dumpster in different, color-coded bags and I am supposed to trust in the private waste-removal companies to sort them after they pick them up and compact it all together- hah, that’s funny), which doesn’t even cover our apartment, since it is larger than 4 units.

Yay! After a bit of conflict that ended with my sweetie saying “if it’s important to you, we’ll do it” (awww….) we got some bins from the container store and are now starting to recycle what we can. It still bothers me that we can’t readily recycle plastic bottles, since most of what we drink is bottled water, but I am going to work around it by buying us a water filter pitcher and reducing the amount of plastic bottles that we do consume. I have to remember the “reduce” part of “reduce, reuse, recycle”. :)

Starting to recycle is my first goal.

I am learning about recycling in Chicago and how stupid it is. In my parents’ hometown recycling was done very well (or so it seemed to me). In Chicago this appears not to be the case. There is this “blue bag recyling program” that I thought I would be able to recycle through, but it turns out that the program is limited to only single-family households and apartment buildings with four or fewer units. In apartment buildings with more than four units the owner or building manager is required to provide some sort of recycling program, but I do not believe that ours does. I guess I should call and find out, but thus far I have seen no evidence of such a program.

Chicago’s Recycling programs strike me as rather primitive. It appears that I will have to store stuff up in my apt and drive it to a recycling facility. Grrrr….

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/recycling/

and now I take this earth day footprint quiz and it tells me that if everyone lived like me we would need 5.1 earths?

That is amazing. Where does one even start on something like this?