Keeping it on the Merry-Go-Round

Of course we have always recycled. Both Rick and I are decades-old recyclers who've been gathering and sorting and storing and carting off bags of miscellany since long before curbside was invented, since long before recycling was de rigueur. More recently, for a short, sweet time, we were squirreling away goodies for a local company that took all the plastics not recyclable anywhere else in town, the cereal box liners and the styrofoam cups and the sad old toys. That company would hold an event three times a year in a church parking lot, and swarms of plastics hoarders -- our people! -- would show up with bags and bags and bags of weird shit they'd been keeping in their laundry rooms for the occasion. Then the economy crashed, the bottom fell out of the plastics market, and there is no tri-annual Plastics Round-Up any more. We've still got a stash by the freezer; we're hanging onto it with a kind of messianic hope.

Still, for all that deeply observant recycling, there were always things we had to put in the trash, things that no one, not even the Plastics Round-Up people, could take. Vinyl, for one. And misceginations of plastic and metal that couldn't be pried apart. So I am happy to report that The Experiment is reducing the number of those deadbeats under our roof. I can't be scientific about it, because we aren't (unlike an even more observant anti-plastic blogger we know) cataloging all the synthetic polymers that darken our doorway. But we're generating less that is landfill-bound than before The Experiment started. For at least a year, our household has been producing about three-quarters of a (standard 32-gallon) can of garbage each month. Last week when I went to put the garbage out, it being the first of the month, I discovered we'd only filled up half the can. Safe to assume at least some of that volume can be accounted for by yucky plastics no longer passing through our hands.

Don't be too impressed. We know people who produce just one can of garbage a year.