Are you old enough to remember back in the day when Houlton had a landfill and you could hire whoever you wanted to take your trash and just dump it out of the back of a truck?
The cost was basically whatever they charged for transportation, or you could take it yourself, and at any given time there might be six or eight pick-up trucks backed up throwing our trash. Pretty much unregulated, pretty much unsupervised. I can remember a front-end loader being there on occasion, pushing the trash around, but other than refrigerators I don’t remember a lot of rules.
Then it was time to close the landfill. No choice in the matter, the town council, of which I was a part, was tasked with finding alternatives to not only the open landfill, but also the collection and delivery of our household waste to a transfer station.
I remember those days well, but what struck with me the most was my friend Mildred Madigan who appeared at many a hearing, making it very clear that she really didn’t have much in the way of trash, because she recycled. To me, she was Houlton’s pioneer recycling woman and I vowed that I wanted to grow up to be just like Mildred.
The trouble is, she and others like her are different than me. They are dedicated and committed and I am lazy. So I feel like I might represent the more typical recycling family, who “wants to” do better but just didn’t have the skills, tools, knowledge, or energy to do it right.
Now, I see how easy it is, if you follow just a few very simple rules. And that’s my job here, to tell you what I’ve learned, and if you already know it and do it differently, or better, to encourage you to share, and if I tell you something you never knew, then that’s cool too!
So, rule No. 1 is the word “Clean.” Yes, believe it or not, when you throw away your peanut butter jar, you need to remove the peanut butter.
One of the biggest reasons why you cannot discard your pizza boxes with your other cardboard is because pizza boxes are contaminated with food waste. People leave their leftover pizza in the boxes, or the sauce is all over the cardboard and it contaminates the entire shipment. So lesson for the day is please wash your plastic, wash your glass, wash your cans, and don’t recycle pizza boxes.
You can come to my house any given time and look in my dishwasher and find “trash” in my dishwasher. I put my pickle jars, salsa jars and more right through the dishwasher so they are squeaky clean when I recycle them. My husband has trained himself to wash out cans if he makes soup, and while they don’t make it all the way into the recycle bin, he does the hard part because if you don’t wash them as soon as you empty them it’s a lot harder to get them clean later.
So that’s my lesson for the day — clean your recyclables before taking them to the transfer station! And remember, all No. 2 plastics go in one bin, and the other numbered plastics in another, sort at home and save the others waiting in line from watching you pick out each piece one by one as you stand in front of the bins!
Again, being a lazy woman, I utilize my grandchildren for the sorting as I don’t sort as I toss. I sort right before going to the transfer station and the grandkids love helping me with this. This can be fun, I promise you!
