Garbage Day

Today was garbage day on my street. I take great pride in the fact that I usually have a 2-1 ratio of full recycling bins to garbage cans. Today I had two full bins and one half fun bin to a half full 121L garbage can. I felt pretty darn good. My garbage can consisted of a kitchen garbage bag, a few shopping bags that had some dog poop in them and a green garbage bag that had the contents of the diaper genie, kitchen garbage, bathroom garbage and the cat litter. Really I could have not even put the can out, if I had not already thrown out the first kitchen bag, I could have had just one large garbage bag next to my overflowing recycling bings.

So what is my point to this? There are a few decently sized families next to me. My neighbors next to me are a 5 person family including a teenage and across from me they are also a five person family. How on earth does that mean they can have like 5 bags of garbage and one lonely recycling bin? You can't possibly tell me that there is nothing in those bags that isn't actually recyclable!

A quick check of the city waste collection website shows you just how easy it actually is to recycle. They don't want you to bag or tie anything together. They don't care if the window is still in the envelope of the phone bill, you can still throw it in(something I didn't know until very recently so that's even more that I am able to recycle now) and you don't even have to sort everything. It all goes into one bin that can be bought for $5 at numerous places in town. They also don't have restrictions on what types of plastic they can take. Just as long as it has the little triangle symbol on it, not matter what number is in the centre, they want it.

So with what seem to be as very lax and easy to follow "rules" of recycling, it's unfathomable to me that people can produce an entire bag of garbage in just one week.

So why am I just noticing this now. Where we lived before, we had autobins in our backlane so nobody really knew who was throwing out how much. Actually being able to see on the front street in front of each individual house how much garbage actually gets produced? Eye opening.

So please, check out your city's waste website and find out what you can and cannot put in your blue box.