Boy am I glad our city's recycling department gave us the extra-super-large recycling bin. It's twice as big as our neighbors' bins, but we fill it up almost to the top each and every week. Granted, the neighbors aren't product review bloggers who get samples mailed to them all the time. Nor are they catalog addicts who can't bear to take themselves off companies' junk mail lists, nor do they have dads getting medical journals delivered to their homes every week. Nor do they hoard artwork, birthday cards and bank statements like they were gold.
But I'm trying to change. A couple of weeks ago some friends invited us to dinner at their newly-renovated home. I was so impressed and inspired by their minimalist look that I began a campaign to throw out as much junk from the house as I could. I already cleaned out a lot of stuff for our garage sale, but after that dinner I went back around the house and somehow found even more stuff that, all of a sudden, didn't really seem necessary. This week I did another big donation drop and made good on my Forty Before Forty resolution to shred any bill, bank statement or health insurance statement older than 2008. Thanks to e-statements and bills it was less of a hassle than I thought, but it still required a whole day's worth of labor. Okay, it was more like half a day, and the kids did all the shredding, not me. But still.
Anyway, it feels great to get all that stuff out of the house! I feel so much lighter. If only I could shed the pounds on my body as easily. But that's another resolution, and another post.....
If the kids' school has a Paper Retriever dumpster, you should put all your paper recycling there. The school gets paid by the pound and let's face - schools need all the help they can get.
ReplyDeleteI have separate paper recyling bins in both home offices. Shredded stuff goes there too. We swing by the school on the weekends to dump it all in on a weekly basis.