What are we talking about today?

I'll get back to theme days once I find a groove of posting regularly. In the meantime, most of my posts are about some variation of books, bikes, buses, or Broadway. Plus bits about writing, nonprofits, and grief from time to time.

This blog is mostly lighthearted and pretty silly. It's not about the terrible things happening in the world, but please know that I'm not ignoring those things. I just generally don't write about them here.

09 September 2011

Sharing Good Ideas

I love reading environmental stuff (mostly-- some of it is kind of depressing), especially the memoir-ish, "here's-how-I-do-it-if-you-want-to-try" type. That's more or less what I'm trying to do with my Green Living posts on Fridays, although I realise that sometimes it's more miss than hit.

So this week I'm reading Happy-Go-Local, by Linsly Donnelly. I wish I could remember who recommended it to me, so I could tell you, but my memory is indeed slippy. Anyway, Ms. Donnelly is a mum who decided to go environmental for the sake of passing on a clean Earth to her children (one of the best reasons for going green, IMO), and then wrote a book about it to help other mums navigate the murky waters of local, organic, and other scary enviro-crazy words. What's also great about this book is the progression from easy to hard in her suggestions and ideas. I'm not done with it yet, so I can't give it a wholehearted recommendation, but so far, so good.

But, I want to share a suggestion from early in the book. I've pointed to Earth 911 before as a good source to find recycling centres near you, especially for hard-to-recycle things like batteries. Plus, it's just one of my favourite websites. Ms. Donnelly takes it one step further, recognising that busy parents (or anyone else) don't want to run to the hazardous waste site every time a light bulb burns out. She recommends putting a bin on each floor of the house-- in a closet, bathroom, or wherever-- for those small items like batteries that shouldn't go into the regular trash but also aren't worth a trip across town in and of themselves. I would just add CFLs should be wrapped carefully or kept in a smaller box inside the bin so there isn't a mercury-containing mess when your six-year-old slam-dunks a battery on top of last week's burned-out bulb. Then, once there is a full bin of small items (or you have a larger item that justifies a trip), there is only one journey to be made to the hazardous waste site. Brilliant.

Do you recycle batteries and other difficult-to-recycle items? Do you have a system that works for you?

3 comments:

Felicity Grace Terry said...

Batteries are easily recycled here in England - I need to know where I can recycle old video tapes.

erica and christy said...

Umm, well, I plead the 5th on your question. But a few years ago I read a few cookbooks (mostly the kids/family one) by Marilu Henner and really saw where she was coming from. As beef farmers, we'll obviously never be vegans, but we've adopted several of her ideas, including growing our own humongous (organic) veggie garden and doing what we can to buy local.

But, well, maybe not recycling as well as we should...
erica

Su said...

@Petty: Nice! We have to do a bit of work to recycle batteries. Video tapes... hmmm... that's a hard one.

@Erica: I'll never be a vegan, either! But I do love vegetable gardens. And it turns out that Farmer's Markets are the funnest things ever (mind you, I'm easily amused).