Tuesday, October 13, 2009

Try the Greener Side...And Save Money Doing So

I have a goal of only taking out our trash twice a month. It baffles me how two people in this world can come up with enough trash to fill up an entire trash can in a week's time. But we have been able to do it for quite some time now.

The plant that I work at is outside of town, and about a mile down the road is a truck reloading station for the big trash company. I never realized they had these before, but apparently while I was gone at college, our dump got full, and all of our trash gets shipped elsewhere to fill up someone else's dump. And we don't even live in that big of a city, comparatively. The reloading station is where all of the dump trucks come and transfer their load into a semi that trucks it out of state.

With the past few months' trash itching at me, I've decided that I need to figure out some alternatives to just trashing the dump, or in our case someone else's dump. So I've made few goals that I'd like to accomplish:

1. Make a compost bin

2. Start to recycle- without having to pay extra to do so
3. Only take our trash out every two weeks - This includes finding a company that does bi-monthly pickups
When I got the urge to start this I called our trash service to find out that they do not do bi-monthly pickups, and they will charge us to recycle. I guess that makes sense because the recycling truck drivers have to feed their family. But I came up with a better idea. Our Dillons has huge recycle bins in their parking lot that we could haul our little ones over to when they fill up. That will give us some free recycling, but I still am on the lookout for a new trash company that will do bi-monthly trash pickups.
The compost bin will be great come next spring when I plan on overhauling our gardens. This will definitely help out on having to pay for some good nutritious soil. I found a really easy tutorial online that told me how to make a bin out of some things that we already have in our backyard. You gotta love a free project. Stay tuned to see if I can pull this off and stick with it.
Any body else start to go to the greener side of life recently. I'd love to hear about some of them.

1 comment:

Emily said...

This is such a good idea - I would love to be better about recycling. Setting a goal of only taking the trash out a few times a month is awesome.