Talkin' Trash

A recent stop to our local recycling drop-off day brought me to once again examine how much trash we are generating. Reduce, reuse, recycle. Everybody seems to hear recycle and makes efforts to turn in their plastics, cans, glass, paper, but the biggest step and by far the most challenging is the reduce aspect. When you go about buying food products you are most likely looking for the best price, nutritional issues, or a particular ingredient, but probably not the container that it comes in. You get what you get, right. Well, now I am seriously looking at that. Our recycle program used to take almost any type of plastic. Now it is “bottles and jugs” only. No ‘container’ like from yogurt, cottage cheese, frosting, butter, deli items and the like. That’s a lot of plastic I can’t turn in to recycle now. We do not pay for trash pick-up; we recycle, compost, or burn. Our township office has a dumpster once a year and we take anything that doesn’t fit in another category down to the dumpster. It’s free. There’s usually a guy who takes batteries of all sizes, and old machinery. Once in a while we make a trip to the dump with metals that can be turned info cash. Paper is a good packaging material because it is easily burnable. But I really don’t want a load of plastic stuff piling up each year and that is definitely not cool to burn. Also, I need to get back on track about bringing my own shopping bags. I have a cabinet cupboard full of plastic shopping bags and even though you can reuse them and turn them in, I just can’t help thinking I don’t need so many. The last couple days whenever I run in a store to buy a couple items I quickly tell the clerk, “that’s ok, I don’t need a bag” before they can throw everything in one. Sometimes they look at me funny so I smile and say “save a tree.”

I am curious why we, as a nation, are not doing more to find ways to make recycling materials more profitable. Perhaps I’ll venture onto a personal research project to find out more about efforts companies are making to recycle. But more immediately I am going to attempt to reduce my trash load so forgive me if I go off on a tangent occasionally and analyze our garbage.

OTHER UPDATES: Ben kicked in his first goal of the season during their scrimage Saturday. The boys implemented a perfect crossover making the coaches very proud, his team mate kicked it to him, Ben was right in front of the goal with no one else around and he drove it right in before the goalie knew what happened! Ethan had his first baseball practice on Friday and if weather cooperates will have another tomorrow. He has also been very dilegent about getting out and golfing in the yard, even in our incredibly tall grass. He'll be amazed how much easier to find the balls once the grass is cut. Rob made some progress on the tractor and mower but we're not totally operationaly yet. And, I got my first call to substitute this morning, just a half day for one of the band teachers who had to leave for a funeral. I had the 6th grade woodwind section which was a well-behaved, fun, and talented bunch and then did High School Concert Band with another sub. One of the seniors actually conducted the pieces they were working on for the State Band Festival this Thursday but I was asked by Mrs. Stover-Lange to take some pictures for the yearbook. She left me with the camera and I had a blast shooting the practice from all angles. Maybe a should ask for photo credit?

Hope everyone is having a blessed, rainy, Monday.