A Committee of Recyclers

I guess it should come as no surprise to the readers of this blog that I serve on my town’s recycling committee. It’s a brand new committee, started after my town passed a recycling ordinance. I guess then the town council figured that they ought to have some residents who knew what the heck they were talking about to head up the town’s recycling efforts, and, well, the rest is history. Guess I’ve developed a bit of a rep around town for my greenness, which is how I ended up being asked to be on the committee.

This is just one of those ways that I’m becoming more like mother–and more afraid of that reality. If you have kids, then you know what I’m talking about. It’s that one day when you hear your own mother come out of your mouth–”Because I said so,” “Because I’m the grown up,” “Don’t make me stop this car”–you get the point. Anyway, it’s scary how much we become like our parents, even though we might fight against that.

With my embracing of this green and frugal life, I’ve really come full circle with my own mother. When I was a youngster, she started a recycling program (not just served on a committee) in a neighboring town. I grew up having to compost food, just as my girls have learned last year that they would need to do from now on. My mother reused everything, and slowly I’ve started doing the same. Now that my mother has retired and moved to a new town, she is heavily involved in bringing recycling to that town, including organizing an annual e-waste collection day. Need I say more?

Back to the recycling committee. So, our next order of business is creating a survey that local residents can complete so we can get a better sense of how much recycling they already do and what they hope that our town can do in the future to increase its recycling efforts. Since it was my job to actually draft the survey, I figured I would share with you some of the things we’re going to be polling people about:

* What other kinds of “greening” efforts are you doing for your home or business? (Please check all that apply)

Bringing plastic bags back to the supermarket for recycling (think bins outside Giant or SuperFresh)
Composting food scraps and/or garden waste
Donating clothing to thrift stores or charitable organizations
Swapping or giving away items on Craigslist, Freecycle or similar kinds of groups
Bringing towels, sheets and other used linens to the SPCA or another animal rescue organization
Bringing paper for recycling to Abitibi Paper Retriever dumpsters (green and yellow) on the school campus
Taking reusable shopping bags with you when you shop
Replacing traditional, incandescent lightbulbs with compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs)
Other

* If you have begun using CFLs in your lights (at home or at work), how do you plan to dispose of them when they eventually need to be replaced? (Note: some of the answer options below are not the ecologically correct way to dispose of CFLs)

Toss them in the trash
Place them in with my glass recycling
Invest in mailers to I can send them back to the manufacturer (on my dime) to have them recycled
Drive to a Home Depot or IKEA to have them recycled
Wait until the town debuts a CFL recycling program
Other

* What efforts would you like the recycling committee to focus on or develop in the near future as a way of greening our town?

More recycling bins on the streets of town
A Christmas tree recycling program after the holidays
A community composting program
An e-waste collection program for old electronics, computers, TVs and the like
Other

You’ll notice that a couple of these questions include an “other” answer option. Out of curiosity, how would you answer “other” if none of the selections above described your green behavior? At the same time, what would YOU want a recycling committee in your own town to focus its efforts on? And if your town does have a recycling committee (or something similar), what have they accomplished that’s worth sharing?

I think it would be very eye-opening to find out what residents of other towns would like to see happen on the green front in their towns and to hear what towns are already doing on behalf of the environment. I think we could learn a lot about what works and doesn’t work in other places around the world. I look forward to reading your comments.