Once upon a time, I had a garage. It was just a one-car garage, but a garage nonetheless. When I first moved to this little house-on-a-slab, one of the first things I bought was a set of three bins that nested on top of each other, to be used for recycling paper, plastic, and cans. It was in the garage along with just about everything else that wouldn't fit in the house. I used them...a little.
Plainfield's trash service provided curbside recycling, for which residents are charged a minimal fee with the water/sewer bill. And for said recycling, they provided big open tubs. BRIGHT ORANGE big open tubs. At one point, Plainfield changed trash service companies. The new company provided their own bright orange recycling tubs, so then I had two of them. The three bins, two bright orange open tubs, and my garbage cans all resided in the garage. Keeping them there meant I didn't have to go out in the cold to deposit the trash bags in them, nor did I have to worry about critters getting into stuff. It was easy enough to drag the trash cans to the curb on trash day...but organizing the recycling was a pain. No one ever explained how to do it. Does the waste paper need to go in plastic bags at the bottom of the tub so it won't get wet while waiting for the trash truck in the rain? Do the cans need to be washed out and de-labeled? Will steel or aluminum cans recycle the same? Did I need to check every plastic container to see if it was recyclable or not? It got to be WORK, and I got worse and worse about it as time went on.
And then the garage went bye-bye. My daughter and her two young children came to live with me. My little house had three small bedrooms, the smallest of which I was using as a radio shack/computer room. That left two bedrooms. For a whole year, my granddaughter slept in my water bed with me, and my grandson slept in a double bed with his mother. It didn't work well. The adults were putting the children to bed at their appointed hour, then tiptoeing around to get in bed when it was our turn. The children, being children, were thrashers. The adults weren't sleeping well. Finally, daughter and I decided that the garage needed to become Grandma's room, with a double bed, radios, and desktop computer; my old room with the half-bath became my daughter's room. The next largest bedroom became the granddaughter's bedroom, and the smallest one became my grandson's room with a Spiderman loft bed to double his usable space. We hired a relative in the construction business to transform the garage into a big room. Everything in the former garage was moved to the covered patio. It took years to get it all sorted and disbursed. YEARS...
Without a garage in which to stash all of the equipment, recycling went by the wayside. Then, in a single stroke, daughter and grandchildren departed. So there I was, all alone, having spent $10,000 (much of which came from my daughter) with no garage and four bedrooms. And still no place to keep the recycling stuff. The trash cans went to the front of the house. (They really belonged behind the privacy fence, but that became a problem when the gate would freeze shut in the winter.) The bright orange tubs went to the mini-barn because they were too open and too orange to keep at the front of the house. I pitched the bins. And thus ended my futile attempts to recycle.
I haven't totally abandoned the whole notion of recycling. My church has two big paper recycling dumpsters at the back of the church lot. They use the money that comes from that to fund the paper purchases for the church. For a long time, I recycled paper there, in paper grocery bags....but...the bags would rip...my back didn't like me for hauling heavy, ripped bags to the car and then to the church. I finally gave that up, but I DO still recycle magazines there.
Then, too, I recycle the plastic bags that groceries get packed in. I hate those things. I swear they breed. Put two of them in the pantry, and the next thing I know, there are dozens of them! I keep a few to reuse for keeping things dry during transport to other places, but I DO put them in the recycle bins in the vestibules of grocery stores a couple of times a month. (Interestingly, the "red" State of Indiana, led by then-Governor Mike Pence [now Vice President of the US], passed a law under the radar, forbidding any county or community to ban the use of those damnable plastic bags!)
So there it is. I plead the Fifth. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak. I don't buy individual plastic bottles of drinking water, but I do buy big packages of meat, then repackage them in plastic freezer bags. I do cut up the plastic rings that hold pop bottles together, but I very rarely buy "sodee" that comes with those. I use a lot of paper plates and bowls and foam cups, very bad for the environment, but using regular plates and bowls and cups/glasses consume a lot of water to wash them. Also bad for the environment. What's an old lady to do??
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