My favourite day of the week is Garbage Day. It’s no fun gathering up the smelly stuff and putting it on the curb, but I feel such a rush of excitement when the truck appears to haul away all of our crap. If we’ve gotten our act together enough to put out something really big in addition to the usual bags it’s even more rewarding. Less stuff! Yay!
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the amount of garbage our house produces. I’ve never been a really “green” person and when our kids were born I knew I’d never do the cloth diaper thing. I don’t regret going disposible but it’s shocking the amount of waste it produces — at least a whole extra garbage bag every week full of nothing but diapers. That’s more than 50 bags a year from just our house going into some landfill. Scary.
A few weeks ago we stayed with Sir Monkeypants’ sister and she is a marvel of recycling. She takes literally anything plastic, any small plastic part from wrapping or packaging, and puts it in the recycling bin. And they take it! I wonder if we can get away with that here. Last year Ottawa decided to stop recycling anything plastic except pop bottles, so things like margarine and yogurt containers had to be thrown away. Due to public outcry they’ve restored plastic recycling to some degree but I still find myself throwing stuff like ziploc bags and the formed plastic fronts to cardboard packages in the garbage. I think probably I could be doing more. Anyway, something to think about.
TurtleHead 
I’m a bit of a recycling buff (part of the reason for my handle!). Where we live, recycling is pretty comprehensive and user-friendly. We used to have to sort our recyclables (paper, metal, plastic/glass), but now it all goes into one giant bin. And they recycle plastics numbered 1 through 7.
They also support this thing called a “kitchen pail”, where we put all of our food scraps and soiled paper (e.g. pizza boxes). It can all go in the yard waste bin, which I believe is used in composting. (Actually the pail itself is pretty small; the pizza boxes go straight to the yard waste bin).
When all that’s said and done, the amount that’s left is surprisingly little. We use the smallest trash bin that the city provides and don’t come close to filling it. I’m pretty pleased about that.
I can completely understand, however, that the whole diaper thing is a very difficult decision. It’s a lot of waste, but I’m sure parenting is stressful enough that cutting waste disposal corners is pretty much essential. And most of that stuff must decay back into the environment pretty quickly anyway.
About ‘s sister putting all the bits of plastic in the recycling bin, though — is that actually kosher? Our waste management company is pretty clear about the fact that only things marked with a recycling symbol are allowed. All those blister packs from consumer electronics, toys, or whatever don’t qualify AFAIK. She might want to wonder whether she’s clogging the recycling facilities with stuff that it can’t actually process and is going to end up in the trash anyway…
That sounds awesome! I wish we had a comprehensive program like that here. Apparently, though, there just isn’t the market to support the recycled stuff. Although they have re-added plastics like margarine tubs, I hear that a lot of what they collect still can’t be sold and goes to the dump anyway. Hm. I recently read about a company in Toronto that does disposible diaper recycling — apparently about 80% of the diaper can be recycled, and on top of picking up your dirty diapers for recycling, they will also drop off a new box of your favourite brand of disposibles for you to use in the upcoming week. It’s a fee service but one that I’d gladly pay for if they offered it here — hopefully it catches on.
I just checked online, and here in Ottawa you can recycle any plastic marked with a 1 or a 2, and also margarine-type tubs. Things like plastic bags and plastic parts from packaging are listed as out. But in Toronto, where my sister-in-law lives, plastic bags are expressly included in the list of recyclables. That says to me that any plastic bag — like ziplocs or the little plastic bags that toys sometimes are packaged in — could go into the box. Couldn’t they? I’m not sure about the blister packs, though. Here in Ottawa, when they stopped taking margarine tubs as recyclables, they would actually leave them behind in your blue box if you put them in there, so I always assumed that if they did take something, it meant that it was approved for recylcing. Maybe, though, they were just being extra vigilant about the curbside sort during the transition time in Ottawa, and in general, they rely on the plant itself to do the sorting.