Baby step: change your garbage cans to recycle bins

Is your house like mine, with a garbage can in every room? Trash night requires that you schlepp around the house, empty the kitchen garbage, the  bathroom cans, the diaper pails, the cans in all the bedrooms, under desks, etc. We have a few mixed paper recycling boxes in our home offices, but other than that, we've actually made it hard to recycle in our house. The recycling station is in our basement. So if you've got a shampoo bottle or a magazine that rightly belongs in the recycle bin, it's much easier to find a garbage can and toss it, rather than trekking down two flights of stairs to the basement.

The discussion on the "Recycle at Work" program in our Master Recycler class last night gave me a good idea that would work in our home (perhaps yours too?). It's one of our famous "baby steps." Try this: Don't have a garbage can in every room. Change some of them to "recycle only" cans. Changes like this require a bit of training on the part of your co-workers and/or family members. It's not a good idea to just take away all the garbage cans, and not explain why. But it is a good idea to make it less convenient to throw trash away, and more convenient to recycle. I think with a short family meeting I can get my green family to buy into this new system. I'll ask the kids to draw pictures for the newly knighted recycle bins, so that they take ownership in this project. I'll leave a few garbage cans, but transform most of them recycle bins.

I will also note that downsizing our curbside trash pickup to monthly from weekly has amped up my resolve to get all the recyclables in the right place. Take a look at what you're currently using. See if you're really filling your trash can each time. Talk to your hauler and find out the next lower size, and see if that change would motivate you to reduce/reuse/recycle more.