When love is too much

I had a recent comment about the amount of toys that find their way into a house, and the frustration this excess causes in parents. The parent asks, "How did this happen?? Do they mate and multiply during the night?" This is exactly how I feel. Nose-deep in toys, books, and other kid-things made mostly of plastic, what is a parent who is trying to be conscious of the environment to do?

Consider a hand-me-down as recycling.
It may take up time, space and energy, but consider that bin of hand-me-down toys and clothes as recycling. Feel good about the ones you can make use of, but don't feel badly about having to send some of it away to Good Will or the Salvation Army. One family can only absorb so much, and this gives others the opportunity to make use of the stuff.

Train the kids
My mom attributes this web site to the fact that I watched Sesame Street as a kid. She is probably right. What we believe when we're young sticks like the gummy mess after a ring pop. If our kids develop preferences for things green, then the ones who love them might stear towards those things for their birthdays.

You are only responsible for you.
You cannot look around at the stuff that is produced and feel badly about that. If you aren't creating a market for it, it's not your responsibility. You can only control your actions, though you can influence others by talking about your thoughts and feelings, and by others seeing your decisions.

A gift says, "I love you"
The main point of a gift is to transfer love. As much as we might be tempted to say something like, "We have so much, let's just have everyone donate money this year instead of giving gifts," this misses the point. Giving gifts is an integral part of our culture, and we would be missing so much if we began to discourage the generosity we feel toward others. Even if we could change culture, this probably wouldn't be the change we'd want to make. Self-focus is already strong in our society. So, how do we accept the "I love you" of a gift, while not allowing our lives to be overrun by things we can't or don't want to make use of? Channel the love.

Channel the love.
Your family and friends love you. Part of loving a person is getting to know them, and this requires honesty on both sides. Talk about your preferences for gifts. Some good ways of streamlining the bulk on gifts is to ask for FLAT presents. We discovered this on accident because we moved far away from family, and gifts either had to be shipped or packed into a car. As a side benefit, the bulk of plastic gifts diminished.

Another environmentally friendly gift idea is to think CONSUMABLES. Say you would really like to go out to dinner for your birthday gift, or have your nails done. For kids, a trip to the ice cream shop or maybe art lessons might be good options.

ADD-ONS are another idea. We like to think of things that go with things we already have--like a new Leap Pad book, a kid-friendly mouse for the computer, or a Lego set to add to the ones we already have in the bin. This way, it adds value to the plastic investment without adding much plastic to the collection, and it saves on space.

Value the relationship more than the environment

While I believe God wants us to care for the temporal world he gave us, I also believe he asks us to love the eternal souls he created that live around us. Put the eternal first, but don't neglect the temporal. Let this guide your decisions on how to approach others with your gift preferences.

Recycling Incentives

From experience, recycling is not the same from state to state and probably just as different from town to town. Our experience in Chicago and Florida were nearly identical, just rinse and put all items together in one bin. But in Colorado, this is not the case. (see previous post)

There was one difference between Florida and Chicago. Our town in Chicago had an interesting recycling system that built in a financial incentive for recycling. Each bag of trash required a $2.?? Sticker you bought at the grocery store, but recyclables were free. We made it a point to recycle absolutely everything and could sometimes make it by with only 1 or 2 bags of paid trash. We’ve had to be a bit more altruistic in our motivations for recycling here, which probably contributed to my procrastination in finding out the rules in our new town. In Illinois, new residents were sent a brochure explaining the system, but Colorado trash is all privately managed, and I wonder if the rules are different for each company. With our current company, we didn’t receive any information about recycling (that I know of). Technically, we get charged as a one can family or a two can family. Recycling helps to stay a one can family (though we could just buy a bigger can since ours is small).

Recycling Transitions

It’s been three or four garbage days now that I’ve been recycling in Colorado. When we moved in, I was sad we left our recycling bin in Illinois, and decided to go to Home Depot right away to get a new one. Assuming that recycling was the same nationally, I didn’t think this would be an issue.

When we got to the HD, we went straight to the back where the trash cans are and scanned the huge shelves, looking for the friendly blue bins with the white recycling logo. None. We looked at each other quizzically and found a woman with an orange apron. “Where are the recycling bins?” we asked. She said, “Well, if we have them, they would be here, but they aren’t a big seller here, so it doesn’t look like we have any.”

What could we say but, “Oh.”?

It was a bit confusing and not just a little humorous to us that in a state where they don’t use salt on ice to preserve the environment, a recycling bin could not be found in the Home Depot…because there wasn’t a market for them!

So we continued to throw recyclables in the trash. First the excuse was that we were in transition, and then it was the pregnancy and newborn stage. Finally, after seeing the recycling truck go by the house for two and a half years, I called our trash company and had a pleasant 5 minute conversation with the woman at our trash company. She simply and politely explained the rules, and in doing so, raised my respect for Colorado tremendously. All that I needed to do was to separate glass, cans, paper and plastics (1 and 2 only). I should put them each out in a separate bag, paper or plastic, and the trash people would put them in the recycling part of their truck. No need for a plastic bin that would itself need to be recycled someday, just put recyclables in something recyclable and you’re good to go.

Paper bags seem to be easier to use for separating items. So, this whole process has made me finally bold enough to answer “paper” to the “paper or plastic” question at the grocery store, though I’ve noticed that the baggers aren’t well trained in how to pack them anymore.