Since moving into a bigger house we have been able to expand our recycling. We started out with one recycle basket and have now grown to 3 that we use to sort things to make taking it easier. They are separated into: (1) plastic and glass and metals (2) paper (3) cardboard. I try to make sure when I bring in the mail, I sort through it at the bins and ditch any junk mail.
So here are our lovely bins - they are right beside the cabinet where our trash can is located and doesn't take up too much space or is in the way. Since we have started recycling, it has cut our garbage literally in half - no joke. We take trash once every other week and only 1 bag at that and we take the recycling when it's full - usually once a week or so. We rinse out all of the containers that once contained food - if it's glass or a tin can we will sometimes run it through the dishwasher if it's full to make sure they are clean (so it doesn't smell or attract bugs (or cats and dogs))Another thing I do to help with the trash and I feel is part of recycling (the 'reduce' part of the 3 R's) is I pay almost all of my bills online and for most of them I receive 'e-bills'. This means I pay all of my bills through my bank's website and most of the companies send me a bill through my e-mail and I pay it directly online without receiving any paper statements at all. I can still look up all transactions or billing so I am not missing out on anything. I can see EXACTLY how much money I have in my checking account, which checks have cleared, and what bills I need to pay and when. It has helped keep me more organize and think of how much paper I have cut back by (1) not getting bills mailed to me and (2) not mailing them back for them to dispose of!
For those bills I do still get (but can still pay online - they just don't offer the e-bill services) I keep a basket next to my computer -
These bills get put into the basket after I pay them and when the basket is full, it gets shredded and then recycled with the paper (be SURE to shred first!).I try to make a difference in my workplace as well. As I mentioned before, I am a teacher and this year our school started buying plastic milk bottles for school lunches instead of the cardboard cartons we all grew up with. I became very upset at the amount of plastic that was being thrown away in our school every day (we have more than 800 students and many students buy extra milks!). I taught my kids how to recycle their bottles and we kept a designated recycling container in our classroom and I would take it down the street to the center whenever it got full - it was on my way home and too me a whole extra 2 minutes to do that. Some of the other teachers followed suit and to my relief, our school took a positive step forward and now has recycling containers in the cafeteria! Yea school! I am so proud of you ;)
So, there you have it - the 3 R's in the Morrison household - Reduce, Reuse, and most importantly Recycle!
To leave you, here are some quick recycling facts :) (more found here) Happy Recycling
- 1 ton of 100% virgin (non-recycled) newsprint uses 12 trees
- Americans throw away 44 million newspapers everyday. That’s the same as dumping 500,000 trees into landfills each week
- Every year we save enough energy recycling steel to supply L.A. with nearly a decade’s worth of electricity.
- The 36 billion aluminum cans landfilled last year had a scrap value of more than $600 million. (Some day we'll be mining our landfills for the resources we've buried.)
- Glass never wears out -- it can be recycled forever
- If every American household recycled just one out of every ten HDPE bottles they used, we’d keep 200 million pounds of the plastic out of landfills every year.
No comments:
Post a Comment