Pughville

This is Len. We love Len. Len is our recycling guy. We used to do all of our own recycling(there is no curbside pickup provided by the local government here), but...to be honest...it got a little out of hand. Being hard core recyclers, as we are, we couldn't keep up and found the piles of recycling more than we could handle...especially when we heard the incredibly low price for pickup. So, we called Len. He picks up our large bins every week for about $45 every three months. So totally worth it! But, the side effect of doing this is now every week, I get to witness the huge amount of recycling we have. It got me thinking...what happens to all of this recycling.

In his job, Bob(my husband) was working on a project where there were large amounts of plastic left over. This plastic was ending up in the landfills because there was no easy way to recycle it. So, Bob, on a trip to the Okotoks recycling facility, asked the guy there what they did with all of their plastics. Okotoks is great for recycling plastics. We are allowed to bring in plastics #1-7. This caused a large increase in the amount we recycled and it also caused Bob to stop and think--where does Okotoks send their plastics and will they take what he has at work? Well, they ship it to China. That's right folks...all of the things we buy from China that are made from plastic and wrapped in plastic then shipped here in large containers eventually end up being put back into the same containers and shipped back!!! This shocked me to no end. Why don't we have the facilities here? In fact, recently, I met a guy from China who was here researching how he could get into doing such a service for us Canadians...what are we thinking? Obviously, there is an untapped market here and someone with way more money than me should be jumping on this bandwagon. It also got me thinking about how I could curb my plastics consumption. Thus the whole reusable bag thing from a previous post. Well, now I am going to talk a bit about my recent attempts at precycling.

Precycling is basically recycling before you buy. So...first things first, you ask yourself do you really need what you are about to buy or can you borrow it or rent it. If the answer is you must purchase it, you should then seek out the highest quality of said item so that you will not need to replace it prematurely and you should choose the item with the least amount of packaging or packaged using recycled materials. Like I always say...consumers have a lot of power and if we choose items with less packaging or refuse those that are over packaged then we are sending a strong message to the manufacturers. Toy manufacturers are the absolute worst for this. All the parents out there know what I am talking about. That is why I love the toy library. We can get 'new'(as in new to my child)toys without having to deal with all the garbage that comes in the form of packaging and eventually the discarding of the actual toy. So, now I am challenging you all to think about precycling. Stop and take a look at your recycling the way you once stopped and looked at your garbage...and make the decision to cut back. Figure out how you can lessen your recycling(without, of course, increasing your garbage). Too much carbon is being used to ship our 'recycling' to facilities to deal with it. I'm not going to worry about Len...he has more recycling than he knows what to do with :)