Recycling

I know lots of folks who shake their head when they hear all this green this and green that.    Folks have discovered recycling and being conservative with their energy and think it is an original idea.   I have news for them it isn’t.

In the 70’s  I moved to Minneapolis just out of high school.   It was there that I would first find and develop my personal  green habits.

When I started to recycle,  I lived in a brownstone on the edge of downtown Minneapolis and took my recycling on the bus to the recycling center a couple of miles away.  I now wonder what people must have thought about me toting paper, cans and glass in bags on the bus.  Today recycling has expanded to include plastics and foam. It is curbside in many locals including my Mom’s town of 4,000 people.  I live in the country and I still have to tote my recycling to a center.   Fortunately I have a garage and we don’t have to make the trip as often as an apartment required.

I still use  cloth grocery bags.   I have some that are ratty  that date from when we lived in Minneapolis.   I still find myself adding to my collection of reusable grocery bags, when I find a nifty sturdy true cloth one with a flat bottom.  I also make bags out of empty chicken feed bags. Purenia has a nice looking barred rock on the outside of the bag.    I use them to take things to friends and Goodwill.

I drive very little and miss the public transportation.  I lived in Minneapolis for over five years never owning a car.   When I married, we were a one car family for many years, until we moved to a 4th tier suburb.  In spite of that I was still a park and ride girl.  Public transportation is one those criteria for my retirement city.

When we owned our first home, we started our first compost.    We collected food scraps & lawn clippings in that first bin.   We used our black gold for all our plantings to improve the soil.  With chickens I still have a compost pile, though in the high, dry, cold climate of Montana it takes much longer much longer to finish up.   My soil here screams for that organic material that compost provides.

It all seemed so original to me when I was doing it and yet it wasn’t.   My parents and grandparents were not doing things as overtly as I was, but they had been doing this all the same.   I am sure they smiled at me with my revolutionary ideas, wondering what took me so long.   Now I find myself looking at folks who are just discovering green and shaking my head wondering the same thing.