The Recycling Crutch

After a year and a half of editing down our waste, we are faced with a pretty good looking trash situation.  We get the tiniest can possible from our waste hauler, Recology, which is the 20-gallon cart (although, in an interesting side note, we are forced to pay for the price for the 32-gallon cart because we live in an unincorporated county area with little funding and governance, so illegal dumping is a problem and our waste service is embedded in our property tax statement and cannot be downsized.  But, we can have the small bin as long as we are willing to overpay for it!). Here is what we have generated for the landfill in the last month:

As you can see, there's a few pieces of styrofoam in there (the horror!) which came as packaging for a bike rack.  Kind of a good example of how you win some, you lose some.  Now that the bikes are nicely organized, we ride them more! There's also a small, rotten piece of plywood, a full vaccuum bag and a few miscellaneous things I can't identify. And the best part is that they are all way down at the bottom of the tiny cart.

But, there's a huge elephant in the zero waste room: the recycling.

Here is what we generated in recycling in just this past week alone:

Yep, that's a full bin.  I'm going to be honest: recycling is making us lazy. I am totally guilty of thinking things like, "I can buy this!  Sure, it's overpackaged, but the packing is recyclable." I'm afraid recycling has become the final frontier.  And what's worse, I'm still kind of fatigued from having a baby who doesn't sleep through the night yet and I really really really like the convenience of recycling things and so, to quote Homer Simpson (what an awkward thing to do!) "I can't promise I'll try, but I'll try to try" to cut down on bringing so much recycling into the home.  And I need to try in earnest starting in the spring time, at the latest.