Starting small

I used to recycle back in college at Ohio University when it was convenient and it seemed like everybody recycled. We had a recycling bin that was picked up just like the garbage and they took a variety of materials. After graduation and starting my second job I sort of fell off the wagon. I've never been really excessive in my usage such as leaving my car running, leaving lights on, or littered but I've not gone out of my way to be eco-friendly since college either.

Being busy with life and work was always a convenient excuse not to worry too much about taking extra steps for the environment. We got started again almost by accident when I bought some new garbage cans because the other ones didn't have wheels and were getting beat up when we dragged them out to the road. I didn't know what to do with the old ones, so I sat them on the back porch and it became a convenient place to put aluminum cans. It didn't take long to divide the re-purposed garbage cans into aluminum and single stream so we could recycle more than aluminum cans for money.

I think treating cans and other recyclable material differently from other garbage helped establish a habit and mentality that over time helped us become a lot more eco-friendly and I suppose ultimately resulted in creating this blog. I'll talk more about our recycling process on a later post.

I doubt there will be too many people reading this who are new to living green but at the same time I think it is useful to see that the first priority is just get started by starting something small - for us it was recycling. There's a great number of changes we can make in our lives to help the environment and take care of the earth but you can't do it all at once so just pick something small, something you may already do sometimes such as at work and make it a habit for you and hopefully for your family. Your family's eco-friendliness will build from there.