With our combined efforts and in just a week's time, Russ and I saved all this recyclable material from being dumped into a landfill and were left with only one small bag of actual trash.

I can’t really recall a particular event in my life that made me say “You know, I think I’ll recycle today,” but I was definitely doing my part to save the planet before “going green” became fashionable. Perhaps it was my dad, who used to memorize the location of every returnable can and bottle on the roadside on the way to pick me up from horseback riding lessons and who would then make me get out of the truck and pick them all up on our way home. Or maybe it was the influence of my mom, who dutifully scrubbed out cat food cans and rinsed milk jugs for the garbage man to collect, or who trucked load after load of clothes and toys and books to Goodwill because she would rather someone else use them than throw them away. It could also have been Ms. Bond, my fourth grade teacher, who read us The Talking Earth by Jean Craighead George and who helped us save enough money as a class to purchase an acre of rain forest.

Whatever the reason, I have slowly morphed over the years into a recycling fanatic, someone who fishes returnables out of the bathroom trash (gross, I know) at our office complex, and who instituted a ban on the tossing away of my boss’s tuna cans every day at lunchtime. I can definitely say I have some eco-guilt from years and years of being a consumer. It’s not that I think that I can single-handedly save the world. I just think that at this point humans are so stuck in the “Don’t want it anymore? Throw it out!” mind-set that it will take us forever to get to the point of not producing any waste, let alone cleaning up what past generations have created. And I definitely don’t want to adopt the “it’s not my problem attitude” and leave the world my kids inherit a toxic waste dump.

I’ve had “friendly discussions” with friends, family, and coworkers about why I think reducing our waste and recycling our trash is so important, and I’m done with being diplomatic about it. The way I see it is, unless your local dump or transfer station doesn’t accept materials for recycling, if you don’t recycle you are just being lazy. You’re basically saying either you don’t care if you pollute the earth for future generations or that you don’t think the refuse we humans all create is a problem. Either way, that attitude is ridiculous. If the excuse is that the local dump doesn’t recycle, well, to that I say petition your town government. Start a recycling program. Take an active role in saving the earth. Don’t wait around for someone else to do it because that won’t happen.

Luckily, my dump does have a recycling program, and I am an active participant. Here are some of the ways I’m going green in my life:

Everyday trash: My dump, the Belgrade Transfer Station, accepts mixed paper, magazines, newspaper, cardboard, metal cans, bulk metal, all kinds of glass, and plastics #1–7 for recycling. It also collects motor oil, has a “take it or leave it” building, and has a pile for organic matter like brush, Christmas trees, etc., to be eventually chipped into mulch. With all that we recycle, my husband and I are down to a bag, maybe a bag-and-a-half, of trash a week. It will be even less when we get into the full swing of composting (my New Year’s resolution for 2009). 

The Belgrade Transfer Station’s recycling area and the men who freeze their toes off for 7 hours straight on Wednesdays and Saturdays to make the world a cleaner place.

 Unwanted “stuff”: Like everyone else in America, over the years I have collected a vast amount of kitsch. My husband is even worse. So, when we get stir crazy and start attacking closets, rather than just tossing it away I think forward to what can go in yard sales, to thrift or consignment stores, and to friends, and I put other stuff such as small appliances on freecycle.com. Books I now donate to a used bookstore or trade on bookmooch.com. I use swaptree.com to trade CDs and DVDs and video games. It’s a great place to trade unwanted stuff for items on my “I want” list. I save bubble mailers and reuse them to mail out my swaptree trades. I’ve also discovered that you can wrap a book just like a present in old paper shopping bags and mail it that way. Great for bookmooch trades.

At work: We are able to recycle mixed paper and cardboard, but I bring home catalogs, old phone books, and newspaper, and I have set up a bin in our common kitchen area for cans, bottles, and glass. So far my coworkers are embracing that fairly well. I also try to go out of my way to find new homes for unwanted electronics equipment, sometimes putting it on Freecycle and other times waiting until I hear about a free e-waste collection drive and transporting it there on my own time.

On the road: On the semi-rare occasions that my husband and I buy fast food locally, I try to bring the bags and containers home. Many of them, Styrofoam included, are coded for recycling. Also, when the weather is nice, and I walk on our road, I usually bring a bag or two and pick up returnables. Initially I was a little embarrassed to be seen fishing beer cans out of ditches, but I got over it. I mean, I’m making my road look more pristine, and I get about an extra $20 a year from the cans and bottles I pick up. Who wouldn’t stop to pick up $20 if it were lying on the ground? I just pick it up one nickel at a time…

Shopping: When grocery shopping, my husband and I always bring our five cloth shopping bags. At first it was a pain to remember them, but now it has become second nature to us. I just have to get in the habit of leaving one or two in the car and remembering to bring them when I shop at other stores.

Around the house: Old sheets, towels, and clothes become cloth rags, or, in the case of my old chocolate-colored corduroys, quilt squares. We still use some plastic sandwich bags for freezing meat and for taking dry snacks such as chips to work, but I am trying more and more to bring snacks in Tupperware and reuse the “dry snack” bags three times before tossing them. Another thing I do is to buy nearly all my music electronically now. It saves space and plastic packaging!

Most of my Christmas gifts this year were wrapped using recycled paper, bags, tissue, ribbon, bows - even reused tags!

Even the holidays are a time for me to recycle. I still haven’t been able to shake the desire for a live Christmas tree. Nothing beats the smell of fresh evergreen around the holidays. I figure I make up for it by driving everyone in my extended family nuts trying to get them to save their wrapping paper, ribbon, bows, bags, even tags so I can save them for the next year. I introduced my in-laws to this concept last year, and they have learned to hand over the paper and let me save it for next year rather than suffer one of my temper tantrums. This year about 80 percent of my gifts are wrapped with some sort of recycled packaging. I’m getting low on my supplies, so this Christmas I’ll collect more. I saved my wrapping paper from birthdays and even my wedding gifts. Hello! That is all perfectly reuseable. And I’m sure somewhere a tree is thanking me.

Even with all my efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle, I still feel like I’m not doing enough to make up for my consumerism. But right now I’m doing what I can, looking for more ways to be green in everyday life, and perhaps even persuading some people to do the same along the way.

Sara Lozefski lives in Belgrade, Maine, with her husband, two crazy cats, and three fish. When not working at an educational nonprofit as an Administrative/Development Assistant, she enjoys reading, photography, traveling, cooking, horseback riding, and suffering from hobby-ADD.  Photographs in this piece were taken by Russ and Sara Lozefski.