As a child, I recall grandma collecting every newspaper available. She fastidiously tied them into neat bundles and left them for the Boy Scouts to recycle. I was impressed she bothered. It seemed like too much trouble.
When my own kids were little we, as a family, took our milk jugs to the store parking lot for deposit into the recycling dumpster. They enjoyed using our crusher for aluminum cans and kept a keen eye open for abandoned cans and other recyclable street trash metals. We had a recycling plant within walking distance that paid them cash for their collection efforts.
Prior to single stream recycling, I was not enthused with sorting nor did I care to pay extra to have recycles collected. In my community today, we comingle recycles and the cost is bundled in with trash collection fees. We also donate to a nearby charity thrift store when we thin our clothing and other possessions. We take the extra step to recycle hazardous household chemicals properly and recently rounded up our junk for a local electronic recycling event. We make a number of other efforts. My personal green activism has come a long way, baby.
If you have the tiniest yearning or inkling (and guilt will also do nicely) to become more actively green, check out Living Green: The Missing Manual. And if you are a whiz, doubter, slacker, or disbeliever, this book will speak to you, too.
Nancy Conner's book is an amazing resource and packed with about 100 websites (maybe more) that focus on various solutions and opportunities for green living. Included is one all-purpose website listing all the web addresses organized by chapter. Readers do not have to continually comb through the book. Pretty handy. Another neat feature is that purchasers get a free online edition for 45 days.
The author avoids preaching or a fear mongering approach and offers a range from mild suggestions to extreme solutions for becoming greener. For example, at the 'extreme' end about lunch habits, she suggests that readers consider taking a healthy lunch to work in reusable containers and bringing cloth napkins. For the minimalist, she recommends joining in a group at lunch to carpool or order carry-out for delivery together with coworkers. Both are certainly doable. With this maximum effort-minimum solution approach, the book does not read like some extremist manifesto, but rather a practical guide to pick your own level of green living.
My favorite chapter (three) was on the 3Rs. That used to mean reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic. Now it means reduce, reuse, and recycle. Interesting pie charts break down what types of items Americans throw out and where the trash goes. It talks about the different kinds of landfills. I always believed that at least newspapers and grass clippings would break down very quickly. Wrong. In containment landfills, archaeologists have found grass clippings and still legible newspapers that were 30 years old!
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