Waste Not, Want not.

Friday. Garbage Day. Time to haul (roll) all three giant bins out to the curb for pickup. Black for garbage, blue for recycle and green for compost. Two different trucks come, the first for compost and the second for both garbage and recycling. The compost guy comes first and if I'm still in bed when they come down the street at around 6:30 AM, I know I am late.

The city/waste company provides everyone with the bins. They are decent size, easily large enough to collect a normal family's waste for a week, especially if they are separating it like they should. We do, religiously. We have three separate receptacles in the kitchen and separate it as we go making it simple to put things in the right bins. Apparently we are NOT a normal family, because, we had to order the larger size bins - and pay a lot for them -  because we have so much waste. Even with the larger bins, we always have more waste than anyone else on the block. It's unbelievable.

This is particularly noticeable with my next door neighbors, who, like us, have four people in their house. They are very good about recycling and using green products, as are we. Perhaps, then, someone could explain why their bins look like this

You will note that they too have a larger recycle bin, but a regular sized garbage bin, while we have the larger size of BOTH and still our looks like THIS.

I get the black one and I blame a certain young woman who resides in this house. Maggie produces at least 3/4 of the garbage in this family and it is going straight into landfill. There are probably 50 diapers every week as well as all the other medical waste.

I cannot understand the difference in recycling, though. There is probably more of that because of Maggie too, though I admit we are one of the last houses in America to still get a newspaper.

Wine bottles don't take up much room at all.