Like most people, we have a big bin to hold all our recycling until I feel the urge to take it to the recycling center. The downside to the big bin is:
- I always wait until the bin is full to take it, and then it takes me forever;
- My husband is forever complaining about how the overflowing bin makes us look trashy, and
- The stuff towards the bottom tends to be nasty from sitting outside for so long.
My solution for a while was to accept paper bags when I went to the grocery store nearest my house (the only one in the area that actually gives you the option of paper!), and then toss recyclables into the paper bags. This looked slightly neater, and when I went to the recycling center, I only needed to hurl the filled bags into the containers, saving me a fair amount of time. ( It is very helpful that I no longer need to sort my recyclables- everything goes in the same containers except cardboard and batteries.)
However, I was still waiting until I had a lot of bags accumulated to decide to take them,-you can file that under “lazy”- and then I would forget them, several times in a row, and again with the husbandly complaining.
Then I started to feel guilty about the paper bags. Really, they’re no better than plastic: they eat up natural resources, and their manufacture causes just as much pollution.
The new solution?
Using my fabric shopping bags to hold my recycling! Now if I want to go to the grocery store, I have no choice but to bring the recycling, or else I’ve got nowhere to put my groceries.
Since I grocery shop twice a week, the recycling moves quickly, so no more whining about the aesthetics of the recycling bin, and hastily-rinsed containers don’t have time to get icky.
So until we get the RecycleBank in my area- hopefully any day now, as it has been so successful in Wilmington, a mere twenty minutes away- this is my recycling system.
Does anyone have experience with the RecycleBank? Is it everything I hope it is?
Or, do you have any more good ideas to make recycling less of a chore?
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