women at work

My baby sister lives several hours away from my home Dallas and recently made the trek for a short visit. As is her habit, she brought a few boxes of recyclables that she isn't able to take care of in her town of residence.

A short detour to say: Dallas makes it so incredibly easy to recycle! They accept nearly everything, including all plastics. And no sorting! So sad the number of people who don't bother to take advantage. But more on that later . . .

Before she made the trip back home we took all of our cumulative offerings out to the recycle bin in the alley. She got there first and noted that someone had left the lid open to the elements. Unfortunately, those same elements had been in rare form approximately 1 week prior and the bin was filled to the rim with water. Only a few floating plastic bottles disturbed the relative calm of the somewhat murky surface.

Little sister to the rescue! When I arrived by her side she was in the process of tipping down the over sized container to empty it of it's contents. Fortunately (sadly?), there was little else than water to be emptied. Once the water was gone we were left with a stack of soggy newspapers and a bag filled with various recyclable items.

What to do?

Obviously, the paper could no longer be recycled. We decided, somewhat reluctantly, to sift through the remainders. Plastic Gatorade bottle? Back into the blue bin. Mushy Crate and Barrel catalog? To the trash. Milk carton? Empty water and then recycle. And so it went.

Sometime after the milk carton I became aware that we were actually going through my recycling from the previous week.

At first there was relief that hey, at least we weren't "trash diggin'" through somebody else's trash! But then I realized what exactly that meant. With the exception of a stack of newspapers contributed by the same person who likely left the bin lid open, all the recycling in the container was from me. From over a week ago.

I live in a small apartment building with a total of 6 apartments. We have 3 large garbage containers and 1 blue recycling bin of the same size to share between us. The trash is collected weekly and the recycling every other week. At the time of my above discovery, 2 out of the 3 garbage cans were filled with the third partially full.

Cut back to my previous shout-out to the city of Dallas and how easy they make it for it's residents to recycle. So, so easy. And yet people just don't do it. I know my little slice of the world may not be representative. I hope not. But regardless, the world is certainly too big for me to be in total control of it's peoples.

Doesn't mean I'm not going to do my part to save it - one apartment building at a time.