Recycle Everything (almost)

Benefits

Environmental Benefit: ★★★★★
Recycling materials used in all the products we buy is a great win for the environment. It greatly reduces landfill waste. It eliminates mining for metals, smelting to purify them, pumping oil for plastics and cutting trees for paper. It puts people to work sorting and re-processing the recycled materials. It is basically essential to a sustainable society that enjoys the luxury products we do.

Money Saved: ★★☆☆☆
At least here in Austin it doesn't cost extra to recycle if you are already paying for waste collection. It doesn't save you money directly either, although availability of cheaper recycled materials can mean that products cost us less to buy.

Lifestyle Benefit: ★★★★☆
It usually isn't much harder to recycle than to just throw away stuff. Some communities such as Austin have made it particularly easy! I would say that the real lifestyle benefit is for our children and children's children, who will be saddled with pollution and scarcity of resources if we don't take basic necessary steps like recycling.

What We’re Doing
The city of Austin has a goal to reduce the amount of waste Austinites send to the landfill by 90 percent by the year 2040. One of the great benefits that has come from the program is that we have a 96 gallon "single stream" recycling bin that is collected every two weeks, and which we can fill with any mix of recyclable materials (basically anything that has the recyclable triangle symbol on it and including paper and cardboard). Our trash collection service is a "pay-as-you-throw" service, with two sizes of trash bins available and weekly pickup. We have the smaller size, but I've noticed that most people in our neighborhood have the larger size and are often overflowing them when they put them out on the curb for pickup. By contrast, last week I went to check our bin on pickup day and it was completely empty! I generally put it out only every-other week and it is only lightly filled. And we have a family of 6! The main reasons for our low waste are: 1) We consume few items that require packaging, 2) We reuse a lot of things, like boxes, 3) Most of what we have to discard is recycleable, and 4) if something isn't recycleable it's probably compostable and goes in the heap! (which is also basically a recycler).

A Little Humor
During an attack of laryngitis I lost my voice completely for two days. To help me communicate with him, my husband devised a system of taps.

One tap meant "Give me a kiss."
Two taps meant "No."
Three taps meant "Yes"
—and 95 taps meant "Take out the garbage."