November 15th is ‘National Recycling Day’

Today is November 15^th, it’s ‘National Recycling Day.’ We are greener as a society than we used to be, but we consume more, so are we? I try to be green but it’s hard to know what to put in the green bins. We recycle milk jugs, jars, plastic non-refundable bottles, cardboard and newspapers. Not sure what else the city picks up? I probably throw out stuff I shouldn’t, but I’m doing much better than I did when I was younger.

I do not compost. I find that smelly, buggy and gross. I do reuse things like bags from the store.  Not so much talking about the cloth bags but the plastic bags which we usually use for trash. The gallon ice cream containers we reuse for art supplies, do-dads and odds and ends. Coffee containers we use for change jars. It’s sort of too bad that good quality packaging seems to have disappeared in a lot of ways. Grocery bags for example. About 10 years ago all of the stores went to the thinner plastic. So miss the good study bags. You could actually use them for wet garbage. Paper bags were good too for covering school books back in the day. Glass milk bottles, you can’t really reuse today’s cartons or jugs in the same way.

You can’t give clothes or a lot of goods to family members as you used to because of quality. Clothes are cheaper than they used to be in a way but you can only usually get a season maybe two out of them now. Not really a recycling thing but you get additional use. We think we’re greener but we’re at the same time more of a disposable society.

If you you're wondering what you can put in your green bin, here's a list of items from the town of Brunswick, ME.