Wastefulness - Why We Recycle (and So Should You)

I got a comment recently about how most of my content seemed to be my "In the News" articles. And while I know that only 28 out of the 85 posts I have published are labeled "In the News", it may not be so obvious since I have been trying to publish one "In the News" article per day. So, I thought I'd try and spice it up a bit and talk about something that David and I think is very important - Recycling.

Before I was married, I never recycled. Let me take that back, I "recycled" soda cans when I lived in a state where they were worth a nickel. I read and listen to the news and people are always making a big deal out of recycling. Heck, everything seems to be "going green" these days from packaging in recycled paper to hybrid vehicles in an attempt to get people to care about the environment. I would wager that anyone who has children would be interested in doing what they can to make a better world for their children, but what do I know?

David subscribes to National Geographic magazine and he noticed an ad a few months back for a TV special called Human Footprint. The show is about how much waste in generated by each American in their lifetime. The amount of stuff, and the way it was displayed really made it look staggering. Did you know that in your lifetime you will consume 12,129 hamburger buns, or 12,888 oranges or 31,350 gallons of gas? These are all averages for America, but how staggering are those numbers?

We were watching ABC's World News on June 5th and they had a story called "Our Hungry Planet" where they compared three families and what they ate in a typical week. It was not a statistical study, just three families picked at random from America, West Africa, and China. Charlie (as we refer to him in our house) mentioned a book called Hungry Planet: What the World Eats where the pictures that they showed were from. The story was basically talking about rising fuel costs and how they effect food. When you are eating at the bottom of the food chain, so to speak, (eating mostly grains) and the cost of grain goes up, there isn't much you can do to lower your bill. (I tried to get the URL for the video but for whatever reason I couldn't copy it, so do a search for "Hungry Planet" and it will be the first video that comes up.)

ETA: Since I couldn't link the ABC News video, I found a video that has the gist on YouTube. This video, however, shows 30 families instead of the three on the ABC News segment.

Seeing these stories makes me so grateful to live in America but at the same time ashamed that we have succumbed to consumerism in such a way that we are so wasteful and take for granted the things we have. David read two books called Garbage Land and High Tech Trash (which he reviews on his website [David's Irreverent Book Reviews] here) and that just solidified his urge to do what we could to make this world better and that included recycling more.

We started a few years ago with recycling paper. Now it is second nature. We take the labels off of soup cans, and all mail is either directly recycled or shredded (if it has our address or account information on it) and recycled. Any packaging or boxes we get are recycled. We now also recycle plastic, steel and aluminum. Anything that is #1 or #2 plastic gets recycled. We have been meaning to start on glass, but we don't buy a lot of things that are made of glass and the only recycling center that takes glass in a 15 min drive away. The recycling is not automatically picked up in our neighborhood, like it is in some. We have to gather it in bins and take it ourselves to be recycled. Honestly, if you have it picked up in your neighborhood there is no excuse. Throwing something into the recycle bin is just as easy as throwing it in the trash.

And you know what? We used to have a bag or two of trash every trash day. Now we have 1 trash can full every 2 weeks. And that is with a baby in the house. Maybe we can't change the world or make a difference all on our own, but we are doing good and teaching Willow the importance of recycling.