Reducing Recycling

copyright 2006 by kittenpie

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I was walking along yesterday, kicking aside recycling bins dumped willy-nilly across the sidewalk by their collectors, and noticed a man bringing his back into his house. He had no less than four bins, one of them of the oversized, super-deep variety. Granted, the city collects recycling every other week, but what is really equal to five bins seems excessive. This made me think. Is a recycling programme as much a balm to the citizens' consciences as it is a real environmental benefit - maybe even more so?

The first of the three R's, and the real key, is supposed to be Reducing. Buying with less packaging. I'm not great at this myself, I must admit, for most things do come with packaging, even at our small local fruit markets, and certainly this is especially true of the standard grocery store convenience foods. I should be doing better here, to be honest with myself. This is something I'd like to watch a bit and see where I could be saving on packaging. Coffee in go cups, to be sure. I'm terrible with coffee cups, so perhaps I should stop being so lazy and use a go cup or make my coffee at home.

Next comes Reusing. I do okay here, and with Misterpie and I both working with kids, even a lot of recyclables get stuffed in a cupboard for later crafty uses. (Meaning someone else will curse us and recycle them later, but... reuse is reuse, isn't it?) I came from a home with little to no tupperware, where margarine and ice cream tubs were used to store food, and I do this too at times. Wooden clementine crates and cardboard peach baskets hold tools and toys and I'm planning to outfit a couple as toy dog beds this winter. Plastic berry boxes make great crayon boxes in the library, at school, and at home. Some cans are standins for toy food products. Paper bags and sturdier plastics get used a few times before being used to bundle up recycling, while plastic bags get shipped periodically to the library for use by patrons on rainy days. Papers get drawn on by Pumpkinpie (or us at her behest). Not too bad.

And yes, we recycle, of course, and put food scrapings in the green compost bin. But I think recycling is meant to be the last stage, after the first two. I don't think 5 bins of recycling is really the ideal we are striving for, is it? We average about two, sometimes three, but that guy made me think twice about the whole thing and wonder if I couldn't do better. I'm going to start with the coffee cups and plastic bags, two of the biggest culprits I can identify right away, and look for other places I can avoid bringing home more stuff for the blue bins.
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And like this isn't enough about recycled garbage... yet another reminder to submit your tagline!