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Thursday, November 12, 2009

Tales of recycling...


I'm don't recycle for the sake of being green... I recycle because we have a land fill (when we shouldn't) and they make it relatively easy to recycle. Other places that I have lived have been way too difficult to recycle in... Way too much prep time in my mind... (like cutting the labels off your bottles... not gonna happen) My motto is: If it CAN be recycled, and it's EASY to recycle, why not recycle?

Anyway, here in Juneau, I just go to the dump. They have a couple of buildings to house the recylables, one of the buildings is for household items. I load up the car and spend 10-20 minutes there splitting it all up. There is a bin outside for glass, one for tin (soup cans and such). Then, inside, there are the areas for aluminum, plastic (2 kinds) and paper and cardboard.

It's centrally located in Lemon Creek, which means it's a short drive for me... If I'm heading that direction during the day, I'll usually take recycling with me and make a brief stop.

Tomorrow is recycling day... I gathered up the recyclables between my office and my home and the car is loaded (mostly with cardboard)... They also take shopping bags, which I still seem to accumulate even though I have many of those other kinds of bags that you can re-use... You know the ones... Not quite cloth, but not quite plastic... I'm not quite sure what they are... I use the regular plastic shopping bags in my wastebaskets that are all over the house (also for poo baggies when I'm out of the biodegradable kind), but I don't think I need a drawer, a shelf, and several of those bags full of other bags... I have a dispenser for the plastic bags, so I think that'll hold me for a while.


I'll need to make a second trip at some point, for the additional stuff in the house. I recently purchased some bins specifically designed for recycling... They are bigger than I thought... When they fill up, I'll take them down... Or empty the contents into a garbage bag to sit in my garage until the next trip... As for now, they are fine to sit in my broom closet.

Does anyone know what the colors are supposed to be for? I figure that blue is for aluminium (as seen in the picture), but we are using that one for glass... Any thoughts?

1 comment:

globalgal (Heather) said...

I think the blue is for aluminum, yellow is for glass and green for plastic, although when I lived in Toronto, we also had gray for paper/cardboard and dark green for organic material. Now that I am in China, there is no need to recycle. Whatever I throw in the trash cans on my street gets picked through by industrious older people looking for plastic, glass, cardboard, etc. that they can sell.