Hello Again All,
I’m sorry for extended hiatus but
you wouldn’t believe how hard it is to recycle here! For those of you who don’t
know, I am currently living southern West Virginia. We don’t have a normal
recycling program here (where you are given a recycling bin with your trash bin
to put out each week) or even an easy way to recycle anything. I perused the
phone book (after getting zero useful hits on google and yahoo local) and found
a few recycling centers.
Two centers near me looked vaguely promising. One phone number rings and rings with no answering machine. The other center, which was only about 2 towns over, is actually closed. A nice gas station attendant told me that she thinks there is a recycling center in the next town over (now we are at 3-4 towns from home). Really????
Two centers near me looked vaguely promising. One phone number rings and rings with no answering machine. The other center, which was only about 2 towns over, is actually closed. A nice gas station attendant told me that she thinks there is a recycling center in the next town over (now we are at 3-4 towns from home). Really????
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| Remember Me?? |
So now
that I am fully frustrated with a goose chase that shouldn’t have existed in
the first place, I have a trash can full of plastics, glass, cans, Styrofoam,
and of course, trash. Believe it or not,
sorting your plastics, glass, and cans from your trash actually save a considerable
amount of space. When in California, we produced approximately 3 kitchen bags
of trash each week, and 4 bags of recycling. Now that there isn’t a recycling
program, we have DOUBLED our “trash” output.
What to
do now? While you may ask “why not just separate your recycling and store it
until you can find a place to bring it?” Well now, that is a good
question. We are currently separating
cardboard from our trash, and I am working on a way to organize the rest of the
recyclables, however storage is the biggest problem here. We live in a small
home, and don’t want to clutter our house (or yard) with bags of sorted
recyclables. So for now, I’m trying to
get creative with the other two R’s.
In an
effort to Reduce and Reuse, I’ve come up with a few ideas to help our family
create less trash. Some of our cans, bottles, and Styrofoam are saved for craft
projects. Some items, like jars with lids, I keep and Reuse as containers and
organizers, and also to put home-made sauces in.
I also bought a few spray bottles from the dollar store that I use for cooking oils and vinegars. I like the convenience of having my most used kitchen liquids in spray form. I also love that I don’t have to buy cooking spray in aerosol cans, and can just refill my spray bottle at home. This covers 2 of the R’s, Reduce, and Reuse. By reusing the spray bottles, I can buy vinegar and oil in bulk, and reduce our consumption of smaller, more ‘convenient’ sized bottles. Also, when buying in bulk, you usually spend less per unit on an item, saving money overall.
Now
that I feel I’ve bored you all thoroughly with a post that has no real topic
except a little bit of complaining, I’ll leave you with a few links I found
worth checking out. Peace, Love and Blessings!
Natural Cleaning, from a lovely blog I follow:
An interesting article on Recycling, and why people don’t do
it:
And finally, a cool step-by-step for making a chandelier out of jars:
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