Recycling day
My dog Baci
I’m not sure why I choose to walk the dog on trash mornings. It just aggravates me and that’s the wrong way to start any day.
This morning I looked down the block and saw only three homes with blue recycling bags on the curb. Three out of thirty-two, and one was mine.
I passed a curb with two…count ‘em, two…black oversized Rubbermaid trash cans overflowing with beer cans and plastic pop bottles and food containers. If the neighbor had just put them in a blue
bag and set them alongside the trash, here’s what could have been saved:
1. tax dollars, since it costs less for the city to send them to the recycler than to pay to have the trash company haul them and tip them into the landfill;
2. jobs, since those saved dollars can pay a service department employee who can do other work to keep our city clean;
3. energy, since it takes less to recycle these materials than to make new ones out of raw materials;
4. oil, since plastic food containers are made from it;
5. the environment, since the mining of bauxite for aluminum destroys whole ecosystems.
When those folks complain to me about the taxes they pay, they are going to get an earful!
PAPER is what we should be recycling most, since it weighs the most and we pay for trash disposal by the ton. Every ton that we divert from the trash truck to the recycling truck saves us money…in fact, with paper we MAKE money when we sell it to the recycler.
Why won’t you recycle? Tell me, please.
Anyway, Baci met a new friend…Keller Beaver is a rescue dog, and we’re happy to live in this dog-friendly neighborhood.