Life is a Process

I feel blessed, in some ways, that I grew up in an area that pioneered “blue box” recycling. Saving up the cans, paper and containers has become second nature to me now. It MADDENS me that we live just a teeny tiny bit outside city limits that (a) we have to pay for private trash collection; (b) no private trash collectors do recycling; and (c) we have to haul our recycling products to the local recycling center (where we often battle with the yellow jackets). Yet, if we lived in the city (well, large town), we have FREE curbside recycling though we would have to pay a modest fee (but much much less than our current fee) for trash collection.

I have heard, over the years, arguments that “bah, recycling isn’t worth it - it doesn’t save anything”. Well, I was elated to read this tidbit in the Economist. I can sleep again at night knowing that my recycling efforts are not in vain.

Well, I can sleep until I get the next package in the mail from Gaiam.com. This mail-order/web-store company purports to be a green company. We ordered some rechargeable batteries from them and I cannot count the bits of unnecessary packaging that arrived. One set of batteries were in a ziplock bag - so far so good. The AAA batteries came in this elaborate, shrink-wrapped package, surrounded with additional layers of cardboard and recycled plastic. The shrink-wrapped part would have been sufficient.