No, its not a dead mouse.
No, its not a decaying half eaten banana.
It's 6 bags of juice boxes, milk cartons and pop cans destined for the recycling centre and the stench is enough to drop a saskquatch where he stands.
Yup, recycling day.
Here's a visual...
I don't mind getting dirty so for me it shouldn't be a big deal - I was a farm girl. I've had cow poop in the barnyard squish between my toes and flicked it out with my fingers... I've rode bareback in shorts on a sweaty horse to dismount with the world's hairiest inner thighs... eew - sweaty horse hairy legs! I've been four-wheeling in the mud, changed hundreds of poopy diapers, even caught toddler barf with my own bare hands....
But picture it....
The school from whence it (the recycling) came has 110 children ages 5 - 10. Various degrees of healthy and sick; 6 giant clear sealed garbage bags/petri-dishes waiting to be opened, filled with juice boxes half full, four days to two weeks old, sour and fermented from sitting in the heat of the day, half eaten sandwiches, used papertowel, sticky pop cans, chocolate milk cartons with curdled milk, soggy crackers, yogurt drinks with mold in the lids, snotty kleenexes, granola bar wrappers, straws that flick some sort of used-to-be-juicy-saliva at you when you dump them out on the recycling table.
This two weeks of recycling is enough to fill a half of a truck box.
The school next door to this one has 450 children. The one down the block has almost 500. The one across the park has a similarly high number! Then there is the high school with closer to 1000 kids which is a few blocks away. I am not counting the other four schools in this community.
Times the number of children by the bags and bags of drinking containers formerly destined for the land fill and get a good mental picture of the sheer volume of refuse destined to pollute the earth. MacLean's magazine ran an issue a week or so ago that talked about the new environmental sin; water bottles. In our quest for clean water, we are polluting the earth in record time.
Does anyone have any tips for being a successful recycler? I personally have three green garbage cans with lids at home that we use for our recycling. They fill up in a month and are easy enough to lug to the depot. But what about glass, newspapers, shopping bags and tin???
GUESS WHAT WE'LL BE FEATURING IN AN UPCOMING ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE???
So here's the next recycle dilemma .... not that these can be recycled...
Feminine products. If the average woman starts her period at 13 and has regular periods until 50 (we'll shave some time off for pregnancies). Each period lasts on average 5 days and each day she changes feminine products 4 times (every 6 hours). DO THE MATH!!!!!! 5 days a month = 60 days per year. 20 product changes over 5 days = 100 individual pads or tampons. 100 x 12 months = 1200 individual products x 37 years!!! You have a landfill's worth of product garbage totalling 44,400 pieces. PER WOMAN?!?!
TIMES THAT BY HOW MANY MILLIONS OF WOMEN IN CANADA ALONE? Yikes.
I've always been a cardboard applicator tampon kind of girl. (ACK! TOO MUCH INFORMATION) Even in these times of fancy wings and soft curved plastic grips, I've preferred old fashioned cardboard.
Now you can have a happy period. Complete with a separate little handi-wipe in its own little extra plastic package for you to add to the collective pile.
Yay. Doesn't that make you feel happy?
No, its not a decaying half eaten banana.
It's 6 bags of juice boxes, milk cartons and pop cans destined for the recycling centre and the stench is enough to drop a saskquatch where he stands.
Yup, recycling day.
Here's a visual...
I don't mind getting dirty so for me it shouldn't be a big deal - I was a farm girl. I've had cow poop in the barnyard squish between my toes and flicked it out with my fingers... I've rode bareback in shorts on a sweaty horse to dismount with the world's hairiest inner thighs... eew - sweaty horse hairy legs! I've been four-wheeling in the mud, changed hundreds of poopy diapers, even caught toddler barf with my own bare hands....
But picture it....
The school from whence it (the recycling) came has 110 children ages 5 - 10. Various degrees of healthy and sick; 6 giant clear sealed garbage bags/petri-dishes waiting to be opened, filled with juice boxes half full, four days to two weeks old, sour and fermented from sitting in the heat of the day, half eaten sandwiches, used papertowel, sticky pop cans, chocolate milk cartons with curdled milk, soggy crackers, yogurt drinks with mold in the lids, snotty kleenexes, granola bar wrappers, straws that flick some sort of used-to-be-juicy-saliva at you when you dump them out on the recycling table.
This two weeks of recycling is enough to fill a half of a truck box.
The school next door to this one has 450 children. The one down the block has almost 500. The one across the park has a similarly high number! Then there is the high school with closer to 1000 kids which is a few blocks away. I am not counting the other four schools in this community.
Times the number of children by the bags and bags of drinking containers formerly destined for the land fill and get a good mental picture of the sheer volume of refuse destined to pollute the earth. MacLean's magazine ran an issue a week or so ago that talked about the new environmental sin; water bottles. In our quest for clean water, we are polluting the earth in record time.
Does anyone have any tips for being a successful recycler? I personally have three green garbage cans with lids at home that we use for our recycling. They fill up in a month and are easy enough to lug to the depot. But what about glass, newspapers, shopping bags and tin???
GUESS WHAT WE'LL BE FEATURING IN AN UPCOMING ISSUE OF THE MAGAZINE???
So here's the next recycle dilemma .... not that these can be recycled...
Feminine products. If the average woman starts her period at 13 and has regular periods until 50 (we'll shave some time off for pregnancies). Each period lasts on average 5 days and each day she changes feminine products 4 times (every 6 hours). DO THE MATH!!!!!! 5 days a month = 60 days per year. 20 product changes over 5 days = 100 individual pads or tampons. 100 x 12 months = 1200 individual products x 37 years!!! You have a landfill's worth of product garbage totalling 44,400 pieces. PER WOMAN?!?!
TIMES THAT BY HOW MANY MILLIONS OF WOMEN IN CANADA ALONE? Yikes.
I've always been a cardboard applicator tampon kind of girl. (ACK! TOO MUCH INFORMATION) Even in these times of fancy wings and soft curved plastic grips, I've preferred old fashioned cardboard.
Now you can have a happy period. Complete with a separate little handi-wipe in its own little extra plastic package for you to add to the collective pile.
Yay. Doesn't that make you feel happy?