Archive for January 15, 2009
Recycle: Get out of the kitchen!
Where’s your recycling bin? Not the big one that gets emptied by the garbage person (non-gender specific!). The little one in your house that you fill to the brim, then take down to the big bin. Where is it?
Mine is in the kitchen, in the cupboard under the sink. Most of the stuff that goes into it is kitchen recycling. It’s usually full of things like squished cereal boxes, flattened soy milk cartons, tin cans and the free local newspaper that gets dropped off every week, rain or shine. We never read it.
Sometimes I feel good about myself for recycling so much, keeping junk out of landfill. Other times I feel bad – shouldn’t I be trying to re-use some more?
But beyond both of those points is another – am I junking things unnecessarily? Is there stuff that should be in the recycling bin… but isn’t?
Oh yeah. There sure is. I just gotta get out of the kitchen.
The bathroom, for example, has lots of stuff to recycle, like:
- Toothpaste boxes
- Shampoo bottles
- Soap boxes
- Toilet rolls
- Moisturiser and toner bottles
- Conditioner bottles
- Tissue boxes.
I am making a concerted effort to remember these things. I’m trying to be innovative, so I’m emulating the most lateral-thinking person I know of. I think… what would MacGyver do?
Remember to think: what would MacGyver do?
So when I stretched my brain and tried to think like MacGyver on the Mastercard ad with the sock and the pen and the paperclip, I thought of some other less obvious recyclable stuff you might find around the place too:
- Shopping receipts
- Junk mail, if you still get it
- Dog shampoo bottles
- Notebooks
- Printer paper
- Moving boxes
- Lightbulbs (environmentally friendly fluro bulbs should be taken to a collection agency)
- Medicine boxes and bottles (take off your labels)
- School newsletters
- Paint tins
- Mobile phones (most phone shops collect them)
- Magazines
- Laundry detergent bottles
- Plastic bags (grocery stores have collection boxes)
- Envelopes
- Old posters
- Old photos (shred the photos – by machine or the eco-friendly way – by hand)
- Bus tickets (although I go paperless these days).
As great as recycling is, it won’t make a significant impact unless everyone jumps on the bandwagon, and starts committing to the endeavour. But it really won’t make a difference unless everyone remembers to recycle everything they can.
So who is the most MacGyver of all? What weird stuff do you recycle?
Note: The What Would MacGyver Do? image came from Threadless t-shirts.
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