Anyone who knows me would not consider me to be
"green".....not because I don't
care about the environment, but I am
a product of living in the South. Sad to say,
recycling is not in anyone's vocabulary in this area.
Truly, it amazes me when I visit northern cities or
other households outside of our area. In our city,
you will not ever see a public
garbage can that separates cans, paper
and plastic. I can't think of any person
or friend living here that even separates garbage in
their house. We all drive SUVs and other gas guzzling
vehicles, water conservation is not a thought
on the horizon (living at or below sea level, we
have a never ending supply of water), and
no one shops with their "own" shopping bags.
This is the sad reality of the South.
One time, when Elizabeth was in second grade,
she came home and said "Mom, we need to recycle".
Somewhere, she had read about it and was inspired.
At that time, there was only one place to drop
off recycled items and they were open from 10:00 to 12:00
on Saturday. If you missed the two hour
window, you were stuck with your items for
another week! She labeled separate bags for
paper, cans and plastics and our family
made a valiant attempt to recycle! However, weekends
are very busy for us and we could rarely make the
drop off time. We suffered with stinky garbage for weeks
and finally, with good reason, our recycling
efforts fell apart. I tell you this so that anyone
reading this who is not from this area, can understand
that you must have a support system and
community effort to have successful recycling.
It must be my age as for some reason, I am starting
to become very aware of just how much plastic
we use on a daily basis. People that live in our area
think nothing of buying cases of water, and everyone I
know has water bottles in their refrigerator. Surprisingly,
I, a product of the non-recycling South, have a problem
with this. So, after years of buying plastic water bottles
and throwing them in the regular trash, I have
stopped using disposable plastic water bottles.
Several months ago, our local grocery store had these water
bottles on sale. I bought five, one for each member of the
family. I still bought some disposable water bottle for
"guests" that came to our house.
It worked really well; there were no complaints
from the peanut gallery. So, I expanded and bought
more. We labeled the bottles with names of our family,
friends that come over on a daily basis and "guests".
I now buy no more plastic disposable water
bottles and really do think they should
be outlawed. Now, this doesn't
sound like much of an accomplishment to
people who recycle on a daily basis, but for me ~
it is a giant step forward!
Maybe garbage separating trashcans will be next!
FYI - Pesto Making Post is still "coming soon"!
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