Paper or Plastic?

Todays front page had an article about Brownsville, TX being the first city in the state to ban single-use "urban tumbleweeds".  We are soooo behind the times here when it comes to this!  It will be years before the movement makes it to a major city, one small step. I love their tag "urban tumble-weeds", we saw tens of these bags stuck on barb wired fences driving from Baton Rouge to Houston, they were my wind gauges!  The town is giving away reusable bags and so are many businesses, the trick will be getting people to actually use them.  It is going to take a lot of training to get Texans to use reusable bags!  I do occasionally see shoppers bring their own bags into the grocery store now.  I am usually the weird one, the crunchy granola girl, making the baggers learn how to load a reusable bag.  I will admit that having many "urban tumbleweeds" over the holidays came in handy for disposing of stinky diapers.  No diaper genie here!

So that is my public service announcement regarding Canada and the U.S., just to stay true to the title of the blog.

Trash Talk

We have become good little recyclers!  Our Canadian training has paid off and the reason I know this is that our recycling bin is always overflowing!  In Toronto we had trash and recycling pick up once a week.  The recycling was always full, the trash....depended on who had been home that week and how busy we had been.  At the shore we have trash pick up every other week and recycling every other week.  Talk about some full bins and bags not to mention the smell!  I learned to love to recycle, it does not stink like other trash and the less trash I have at the shore the less stuff I have to drag down the long lane. 

Here we have trash pick up twice a week.  Decadent! Recycling pick up once a week.  I must say there are some weeks when we don't even have a full bag of trash to put out on Tuesdays so we usually just skip Tuesday pick up all together.  On Friday we always have mountains of paper, plastic, aluminum and cardboard in the recycling bin.  Note, I did not mention glass.  They don't pick up glass here!!??  Are you kidding????  Being trained in the Canadian recycling school we dutifully pile all our glass, I'll be honest....wine bottles,  in another area of the garage and tote it to the local recycle station when it starts to take over the corner of the garage.  Unfortunately, the visual all those wine bottles presents is daunting.  Multiply times $10 or $15 a bottle and that's a lot of allowance. 

One more little observation...in the "green" category.  In Toronto everyone uses their own grocery bags or else they get charged 5 cents a bag for those plastic bags.  When I bring my grocery bags to the grocery store here the baggers have no clue how to pack them.  They are so used to putting 2 or 3 things in those plastic bags that they pack the bags I bring the same way.  What a waste!  It totally defeats the purpose of bringing my own bags if you are going to put 2 or 3 things in them and then start using plastic bags.

I think instead of that extra trash pick up every week our area should spend that money on TREES!  Instead of cutting them all down they should try planting more!  There is an idea!