Trash: a Friday Favorites.

Hillary over at The Other Mama is taking at least a summer vacation from being ring-master of the FF carnival, but I like having a weekly assignment, so after my own vacation, I'm back. (Yes, I know, as a true blogger-buddy, I should offer to host the carnival during her sabbatical, but... 1) I'm still clueless about most blog-techie stuff, 2) I don't like homework and as an adult I take comfort in the idea that any cop-outs likely won't go on my permanent record, 3) which all says, why rush head-long into an opportunity for failure. I know: wimp. Let me get a year of blogging under my belt. I'm currently a size 20, so there's not a lot of room there yet.)

Anyway, back to the trash talking. I like the options I have to recycle.

Once a year I round up a bunch of gently used but no longer needed personal stuff for my church's annual yard sale.

I also use my plastic bags for the yard sale. Sometimes. Right now they're mostly used for poopy diapers.

I have plans to resume using my non-meat kitchen waste, including coffee grounds, in my compost pile this summer. (Kinda' got off track last year.)

All of my aluminum cans go to my church; can proceeds fund our youth who help with the liturgy-- alter servers, children's choir & children's bell choir. But before I bag up my cans, I pull off the pop-top tabs; these are collected for St. Jude's Children's Hospital which is helping a young child in our parish, and has also opened a center in Huntsville Hospital's pediatric unit.

Recently, I've started pulling out my #1 & #2 plastic bottles & sending them over to my dad in Decatur. Habitat for Humanity of Morgan County has started collecting aluminum cans and plastic bottles to recycle for funds to build houses. My dad is on the financial review panel for applicants, and he's thrilled to put his trash to good use. I think he said they've already funded one house & are starting a second. Even better, as far as he knows, all shape #1 & #2 containers are accepted, even wide-mouthed ones like peanut butter jars. I don't know if they found someone to buy all shapes, or if they just make it easy on their donors & sort out the wide-mouthed ones to trash. I'd like to think they're all recycled. Huntsville municipal's recycling contractor only accepts for recycling the narrow-necked bottles like for milk, shampoo & colas.

Allied Waste Management still gets my steel cans and my newspapers (although I could save up my papers for any of the animal rescue groups.) I also crush down all of my cardboard and sort my glass to take once a month out to the facility itself. Breaking down the cardboard itself saves a lot of space in our trash can. It hardly fills up during the week. If we lived some place that had per-tilt collections fees (I spent a year in Batavia, Ill., which did,) then we'd only need to put our can on the curb once a month. Except the can contains all sorts of rancid poopy diapers.

If our household trash wasn't already burned to power the steam plant for Redstone Arsenal, I'd contact the Army to see if they were interested in using those poopy diapers as bio-degradable munitions.

I love this town.