The Queen of Recycling

I read somewhere that every blogger in the known universe was supposed to post yesterday about an environmental topic that they're passionate about. I'm actually too pooped to be passionate about George Clooney at the moment let alone the environment.

But I will say I'm a big fan of recycling. It's a long standing habit, it's how I was brought up and it makes me feel virtuous. I don't know how much it really helps, but it can't hurt. The Queen referred to in the title of this post, by the way, is not me but my Mom. She was still hoarding bacon grease in 1963, a vestige of either the depression or the war years, I'm not sure which. But we also washed and reused plastic bags, rinsed and opened the bottoms of and flattened tin cans, saved paper and jars and string and tinfoil. I think a cottage cheese container had to split before we could throw it out. She could squeeze the juice out of a dime and that's a fact.

I'm profligate by comparison, but I'm glad I have a lot of those habits. Ever since I've lived in this house (more than 20 years), I've hauled my recycling to the county landfill, about 4 miles away: newspaper, mixed paper, cardboard, glass, cans, and plastic bottles. Hallelujah, we just got a neighborhood recycling center steps from my door! It takes dairy containers though not glass (those wine bottles do mount up) and I still have to take plastic bags somewhere, but it's pretty neat. Now if I could just let go of all the magazines I've been hoarding....

Among other recycling efforts, I've substituted those reusable fiber supermarket bags for plastic. It's a growing collection and I'm using them more and more, but I have to say I'm stumped as to what else besides plastic grocery bags or trash bags to wrap my garbage in. Paper's not real good for that, but I think I could probably make that switch.

I also use the local "freecycle" list to get rid of certain stuff I don't want any more, for example when I bought the wrong camera battery or had a perfectly good computer monitor. You can choose who gets your stuff and for some things it just seems more sensible than Goodwill, though they get a lot of my "business", too.

Mom would be proud.