One of the overwhelming things about the holidays is the packaging. After unwrapping gifts there were piles of papers. The Boxing Day advertisements filled the mail box and toys and gadgets were carefully packed into boxes and quickly set aside.
I saved orange boxes and other containers for weeks and sifted through my belongings for gift bags I've used over and over again throughout the years. But that didn't stop the stack from growing. It was a relief to know it wouldn't be long until the recycling truck would be around.
Over the years I've lived in communities with small, blue box, curb-side pick up, those without recycling programs and others with centralized drop-off points requiring users to clean, flatten and sort. Garbage pick up has ranged from a bin shared with three other houses that seemed to be overflowing every day even right after pick up before I even got a bag to the alley, to traditional pick up and the use of pre-purchased neon coloured tags affixed to bags left on the curb.
Many of the methods tried in communities have been chosen to reduce waste and encourage recycling. Our family's volume of waste has continuously decreased and I'm not counting the years when I used disposable diapers. These days I'm enjoying a two-bin system, one bin for garbage and one for recycling with one or the other being collected each week.
I recently read a news report that the province's largest city would be using the same system and there was an outcry in the article's comment section. It made me want to shout, "It's so easy! Just try it!"
In my last community I filled cupboards with stacks of sorted materials and took them to the row of bins only when I could no longer close the cabinet doors. The new system allows me to walk out the door and throw all of the paper, tin and numbered plastic into the same bin.
I read comments from people who thought it was too much effort to clean the food out of plastic containers or rinse out tins. These same folks wanted a cut of the money raised by the sale of the materials with a market. I remember a discussion with a waste management expert a few years ago who told me that at the time tin cans provided the greatest profit. I haven't tossed one in the garbage in years and it made me feel I was doing something right.
These days when I look into our bins knowing we could go twice or three times as long without garbage pick-up and on some days it would be better to have a larger recycling bin it makes me feel we're doing something right for Earth.
