Monday, September 19, 2011

Tennis again, and a recycling rant

The fall tennis flex league starts this week, so tennis will be taking up more time in schedule again for a while. I've only been going to one class a week, and not playing outside of that since the end of July. I have a match today after work, and Benjamin played two matches this weekend. At least the weather is a lot cooler than it was this summer!

In other news... I thought I had read an announcement that our local public works was going to be distributing new recycling bins this fall that would hold a lot of recyclables and wouldn't require sorting, like my parents have in Bellevue. Can I tell you how much I want this? A lot. Currently, the only recycling Maumelle has curbside is newspapers and aluminum cans. Totally useless to me - we don't get a newspaper, and don't use many cans. You can take other recyclables to the recycling center/transfer station, but they have to be separated by type, and I don't think they take glass. When you don't have city-provided bins for keeping things separate, it is a total pain in the neck to do so - we've tried. Anyway, so today I finally got fed up waiting for news from the city about this and emailed the public works department. And found that I was wrong. They have no plans to change the system that is in place, and "In order for recycling efforts to be cost-effective and not end up in the landfills, the materials must be sorted." Which is, as Bellevue shows, totally false. Not to mention that Conway's drop-off doesn't make you sort anything except glass. So I guess we will have to continue doing what we have been doing, and taking monthly trips to Conway with our cars full of recycling. I have been unable to properly recycle anything at my own home since I moved away from home in 2001 - in Austin, our apartments never recycled anything, so we had to take everything to a recycling center there too - and I am getting tired of it. I mean, how many other people in Maumelle actually bother to take any recycling to the drop-off center? Probably not that many. I do, but I am close to what my cousin (who is one himself) calls a hippy nut-job (I have two compost bins and a worm bin - definitely hippy nut-job). In this advanced day and age, we should have smaller garbage cans and larger recycling bins, and I should have to sort my recycling. Simple things to save the earth, like recycling, should be getting easier, not harder.

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