Is it just too damn hard to recycle?

When I was making a presentation at the Officers training session, one of the participants brought up a point, that's probably a very common issue.

He lives in the country, as do I, and can not receive recycling pick up services from his waste management company. Furthermore, he said it's just too much trouble to take his recyclable material to the recycling center.

This is one I can relate to. I went through a similar problem. In my case, I was paying extra to have the waste management company pick up my recyclables. The trash bill already amounted to $30 a month, and adding recycling to it, increased it even more. What made us cancel the recycling service, was when we noticed, for several weeks, that the recycling bin materials were getting thrown in with the regular garbage.

I realized the county recycling center was right across the street from where we regularly go grocery shopping, and so theorized that it would only take 5 minutes more to go across the street and drop off the recyclable material.

When you haul your recyclable materials to the recyling center that I go to, you can't just dump them all into one container and go on your way. There are seperate bins for glass, plastic, cardboard, office paper,and newspaper.

To make a long story short, We are now regularly dropping off recyclable materials when we go grocery shopping, and this is how we do it:

1. We make it easy on ourselves – We have to do what works for us. If its not easy, we won't do it.

2.  We have one plastic trash can at home for recycling, and the only thing that goes into it are glass bottles and jars.  We don't use a plastic bag, that's just something else that would need to be recycled. We just grab the trash can and go. If its a jar we can quickly rinse out, we recycle it. If its not, it does not get recycled.

3.  We use a garbage bag that we put used milk jugs,orange juice containers, laundry detergent bottles, and similiar large plastic items in to take with me as well. We use the same garbage bag each week. We just dump it and go.

4.  If we have large pieces of cardboard, we throw those into a corner in the garage, and take those with is as well.

5.  Finally, the plastic shopping bags. Those can not go to our recycling center. We have not been good about buying and using the reusable bags at the grocery store. We re use as many plastic bags as we can for other uses, but we have way more plastic bags than we could ever find another use for. We throw the extras in the car trunk, and on the next grocery shopping trip, they go into the stores recycling can. Almost every grocery store I see now, recycles these bags.

So, in conclusion – no it's not as simple as abc, and not as fun as a day at the beach – it's simply another one of those things that's a matter of habit,  what you incorporate into your daily life. My motivation are the images of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. I can't go over there and clean it up, but I can reduce,reuse, rethink ways of taking care of material that ends up there and in land fills.  Every time I go to the recycling center, I am pleasantly surprised by the number of other people that are there also bringing in their materials to recycle.

Between recycling and composting, and living in the country where were can burn trash, who knows, maybe we can get rid of the pesky garbage bill for good.