On our way to work this morning, Husband and I were hit with a shocking piece of information. Posters in our apartment building are informing tenants that the city recently performed a garbage audit on our six-storey building, and it turns out 67% of the waste in our garbage is recyclable! 67%!
Husband's pretty good about making sure paper and cardboard make it into the blue bag. Me, not so much. Though I'm sure neither of us sort things properly, which may mean more to the landfill than we realize. The statistic about our building floored me. I can't believe that we are contributing to that kind of waste. A big part of this issue is laziness. The garbage shoot is conveniently located down the hall, while recyclables have to go outside, and we actually aren't sure where the compost is supposed to go. Until we saw these signs, we didn't know our building provided a composting program.
To date, our only excuse for not composting is the fact that we live on the 5th floor of our apartment building, and I have always been worried about fruit flies and stink. So I did a quick search and found several lovely options for kitchen bins.
I have been known to openly complain about the amount of litter around our apartment building and along our city streets. I hate it when people spit their gum out on the sidewalk or in the grass — that's litter, you know! But now I'm realizing, I'm not any better than someone who litters. If I can't be bothered to sort my recyclable and compostable waste, it's essentially adding to the litter in the landfill. I swear, I'm not completely stunned. I was aware of all of this before now, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to be reminded. Husband and I are looking forward to the information session being held in our building next week. It'll be a great way to get us back on track.
There. I've outed myself. Now I'm going outside to hug a tree.
I'm bad about recycling at home. I want to use blue-bags, but whenever I do, they end up lying on the floor of our entryway, half-full. I was thinking about buying a second garbage can and putting a blue bag in that -- might make me more apt to recycle.
ReplyDeleteThat's cool that your city is investigating though. Gets people thinking.
ReplyDeleteI'm super annoyed that my building ONLY recycles glass and paper/cardboard. Um, plastic? Tin? Aluminum? I hate throwing that stuff away but sometimes I don't have a choice. I'm moving soonish so hopefully my next place will have better options (and composting, how cool! Is there a garden space?)