Under the boardwalk...

When I was a kid in Nome, some organization put on a yearly competition to get people to bring in as many used aluminum cans as they possibly could. I remember picking up cans whenever and wherever I saw them, including underneath the old wooden boardwalks, and filling up garbage bag after garbage bag. I always scolded my Grandpa Al for throwing his beer cans out the truck window on the way to Council. wait, how did I survive 80-mile rides with no booster seat in a truck driven by my beer-guzzling grandpa? It didn't take long for my can-collecting motivation to change from whatever prize was being awarded to just simply getting all of those old Oly cans off of the streets...

When I worked at the hospital in Nome ten (!) years ago I helped start up their recycling program. In Laramie, we recycled what we could even though their center didn't accept mixed paper - which is a major source of waste in this household. I'm thinking of asking the girls' teachers to try recycling in their classrooms for a couple of weeks at least. The school system is one huge waste nightmare.

So yes, thirty years later, I remain one of 'those' people cringing when a plastic bottle, metal can, or pretty much any paper gets thrown in the garbage. Tomorrow we'll bring a giant load of recycling to Anchorage before we pick up K at the airport. Factoring in the six bags of plastic kitchen stuff I donated to a thrift store today, the bags of old clothes to be donated tomorrow, and the upcoming toy-purge, our mountain of junk to be moved next week could be downgraded to a medium-sized hill.
It's sort of hard {read: impossible} for K to support my recycling instinct because the stuff piles up so fast and we've always lived so far from any recycling center. In this hugely spread-out region including Palmer and Wasilla, there is only one place to drop off recyclables, it's way closer to Palmer than it is to Wasilla, they're open only three days a week, and they request a donation each time you go. Imagine what gets trashed in this city with the Biggest WalMart in Alaska!

"How to Green Your Recycling" has loads of information worth reading. Hug that tree.