November 15, 2012
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Have you ever heard of America Recycles Day? Well, guess what – it’s today. Apparently every November 15th is “ARD,” just like every April 22nd is Earth Day. News to me! The kids’ school is honoring it this year, so I thought I’d take it as an opportunity to revisit the original purpose of the blog, which was to document our family’s transition to greener living.
Suffice it to say that the transition has been made, many times over. It’s hard to write about it from this juncture, because we just do what we do and it doesn’t really feel special or different anymore. In fact, the other day I was talking to our daughter about “An Inconvenient Truth,” and explained to her how seeing that movie had affected me and her dad so much that it made us change the way our family interacted with the environment. She was flabbergasted to hear that we used to use paper plates and napkins on a regular basis, and to find out that we didn’t recycle nearly as much as we do now. What better measure of our success than to know that she can’t even imagine our household any other way than how it is now?
We collect bottle caps for school art projects. We collect aluminum pop tops for the Ronald McDonald House. We gather plastic bags and other plastic wrapping for recycling into artificial wood product (through the school). We reuse cardboard boxes, toilet paper tubes, and non-recyclable plastic food containers by sending them to school for engineering projects. We recycle every piece of paper that comes out of our house, along with all the plastic bottles, cardboard, aluminum, glass, etc. It can be humorous to watch me cleaning up in the kitchen, as I break down all the different pieces of things to put in all of our collection and recycling bins. Like an earth friendly chicken with its head cut off!
There are a few collection bins around that just don’t seem to ever get processed. For example, we have 2 overflowing bins of used batteries in the garage, a giant bag of old cell phones and accessories in a closet upstairs, and a corner of the garage filled with household items for Habitat for Humanity. In honor of America Recycles Day, I’ve decided to make a list of these things and get them out of our house and into the hands of someone who will recycle them responsibly. Of course, I just thought of this now, and the kids are about to get off the bus….so it will be in honor of ARD but take place some other day.
Comments (5)
Sounds like your ‘turning green’ name needs to be changed to turned green! I am still struggling to get the family to recycle everything! They have a problem with pizza cardboard – they figure that if it has even one tiny speck of goo or any crumbs that it is tossable. I’m forever fishing them out of the trash! *sigh* Tomorrow is light bulb disposal day. Taking the icky ones to the hazardous waste place… I miss the old incandescent bulbs…
Happy ARD! Garbage used to be so much simpler.
yeah, that battery stuff. Annoying. we have a large collection of empty inkjet ink containers as well.
I used to recycle way better than I do now. Small apartment without room to have bins for recycling. Plus working overtime whenever and having people over with a tiny kitchen, paper plates are hassle free and quick clean up. Although, our landlord this year has set up a few bins outside. One for paper cardboard and one for aluminum. So I’ve started being better and just taking things out ASAP. However, both bins are frequently full, which leads me to throwing things in the dumpster again. I don’t know if they don’t pick it up every week or what.
If I had my dream house though… oh… the things I would do. I want a completely off the grid house with this ideal kitchen leading into herb and vegetable garden… and… if. If. If. If.
This whole business of collecting the recycling and not being able to actually get it out of my house is what turned me against the earth to begin with.
But I am glad there are people like you who will offset my carbon footprint. The world needs more people like you. (To offset my carbon footprint.)