Recycling = Hero

Here in Portland you can recycle everything! Plastic numbers 1 through 7, cardboard, paper, glass, cans, animals, EVERYTHING! Sure, that may not sound too impressive for you peoples in Cambridge or Brattleboro or California or wherever, but here's the rub - there is no free garbage removal, everyone in Portland needs to buy special Portland Trash bags (at a special cost) to have their regular garbage removed which really creates an incentive for people who may not normally care as much to recycle as much as possible to reduce the cost they pay for garbage removal. Also, like Massachusetts and some other states, there are 5 and 15 cent deposits for beer bottles, wine bottles, liquor bottles, soda bottles, cans, etc. which also encourages people to reduce garbage and recycle to collect on those redemptions. It's all singe stream, toss it in one bin and they'll do the rest, receipts, labels from cans, cans, milk caps, cancer inducing Nalgene bottles, etc. Outstanding!

This is a big deal for me. Sure I've lived places where recycling is encouraged, but a lot of places it's still not available/utilized. In Wyoming there was no recycling at all. NO RECYCLING. All the beer/wine bottles from the bars in Sheridan were thrown away, land fill style. Some people (very few) would save aluminum cans and drop them off at a trailer parked in a public place which would be driven somewhere so a local charity could get some cash from the scrap, but that was about it. In Keene, NH at the Keene Sentinel Newspaper, the only thing they recycled was newsprint paper, not regular white office paper. Any office that doesn't recycle paper should be shamed. SHAME ON YOU KEENE SENTINEL! Emerson College had a limited recycling program, and when I lived in the North End and Alston, most residential places disposed of bottles, cans, etc. with their regular garbage.

So, that's a bit of a rant, but too late, you read it. Anyway, every time I toss some junk mail, plastic keg dust covers, pasta boxes, small bits of papers, plasticized cardboard toothbrush packaging material, etc. into that blue recycling bin I feel like a hero - I am Captain Planet. Okay, that's a stretch and I know it, but seriously, it's rediculous how much this reduces garbage. On account of the thoroughness of the recycling and because our compost pile we have only needed one regularly sized trash bag since we've moved in here (over 3 weeks). I think we could have gone another week, but it was starting to get a bit funky so I drew the line.