Wednesday, April 22, 2009

I wish it had been on purpose!

I'll start with - today was trash day.

While we were out of town a month ago, we received a letter and a couple of green plastic tubs which were placed on our porch informing us that our town was now recycling.

Now, don't get me wrong. I love the earth. However, I feel like I've got so much going on all the time and if I could really just get my dishes, or laundry done then I might (maybe) have the energy to think about recycling. Unfortunately, we sort of live in hippie/yuppieville.

My children go to school and have been brainwashed. I get dirty looks when I dispose of something improperly. Sometimes I am verbally reprimanded. It isn't pretty - I just wasn't raised that way, and don't consciously think about it. Nor have the resources been in my area to do so until recently.

My three year old had a mantra of reduce, reuse, recycle. She was three! As such, I sort of dug my heels in, telling my kids that I'd start when their room began to be clean.

However, I started today. Since we had the green buckets, I did some research and figured out what we were supposed to do with them (the note had blown away in the wind while we were out of town). Today- we hauled out a tub full of papers, and a tub full of cans and plastics. They took them and returned them to me empty.

I officially recycled.

Happy Earth Day. I wish it hadn't been a coincidence.

2 comments:

Lauren said...

YEAAHH!! I'm proud of you!

Jules said...

Way to go.
I get so disgusted when I look around at my neighbors garbage cans with cardboard boxes poking out of the top. I became hooked to the whole recycling thing when I took my kids to the recycling center when we lived in Colorado. They did such a good job explaining things and making recycling seem easy. I'm not perfect at the recycling thing, but we do our best. I was so dissapointed to move to a small town that has very little recycling opportunities. Right now, we bag up our recyclables in a BLUE garbage sack and the prison inmates sort it out at the dump.