Oh, rubbish

Last year I jumped on the recycling bandwagon and now I can't imagine how we ever threw away the things that we did. Every few weeks I would dutifully haul our glass, tin cans, aluminum, plastic bags, newspaper, plastic bottles and paper to the recycling center a couple miles from our home, navigate the sea of cars in the chute and elbow my way to the big bins. Doesn't that sound like a lovely way to spend a Saturday?

But hallelujah -- we now get curbside recycling in our neighborhood. I gladly pay the extra $6 a month to avoid the bi-monthly trip to recycling hell. We get to use this spiffy wheeled bin and the best part? NO SORTING! They WANT you to just dump all the stuff in there and forget about it


The only downside is that they do not pickup glass or plastic bags -- I can understand not accepting glass in the bin, because really, no none wants to deal with broken glass -- but plastic bags? Huh. So once every 2 months I still visit the center to drop off these items. Not all centers can accept everything with a recycling logo on the bottom -- ours is no exception, so I feel guilty when throwing away things like yogurt cups or other plastic containers, but there's really no alternative. Although we do save some of those containers to store the shrimp we get from Prince William Sound in the summertime. Along these lines, Real Simple magazine has a great explanation of how to recycle anything.

When we remodeled the kitchen, D worked in an area for my recycling bins -- yes, he's pretty great -- and I sewed a little curtain with Ikea fabric and hung it with some hardware, also from Ikea. It's a great system for me -- when the bins fill up, the recyclables get dumped into the big green bin outside.

My mom has been recycling in her own way for as long as I can remember. In elementary school my sister and I were instructed to bring home our ziploc bags so they could be washed and reused. Hello, my mom is a trendsetter, people! I guess you can say that most Koreans are into reusing and saving -- this post on reusing plastic bags from the blog "Stuff Korean Moms Like" is hilarious but true. And it is truly written with love and respect -- don't send me any angry emails!

Companies even make drying racks for your ziplock bags!

I am truly my mother's daughter -- I save stuff like nobody's business. However it is getting easier for me to purge things and every few months D and I will have a big box of things to donate to charity. This site has some good tips for clearing the clutter from your life, as does this article from Time magazine. Happy recycling and decluttering!