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Wednesday, August 27, 2008

New Thing #229--Reuse It

Today I asked a stranger for some magazines she was going to recycle.

We're fortunate that we can throw our glass, cans, plastics, newspaper, cardboard in a bin and put it out at the curb on trash day. We take the office paper and magazines to a collection site at church. There's very little that we can't recycle in our neighborhood.

The one exception is phone books. I still have to take those to a city recycling center (not my municipality) about 20 minutes away from my house. The center is first class; they have bins to separate glass (by color), tin cans, aluminum, and plastics. In a separate section they have enclosed bins for newspaper, office paper, magazines, and phone books.

I have been known to look into the magazine container and "borrow"something if it looks interesting. I figure if I read something and then re-recycle it, it's actually better for the environment than if I went out and bought it first. However, tonight there was a sign on the container sayng that the contents belong TO the city and couldn't be taken away. I dumped my phone book and was getting ready to leave when a woman and her son came up with a recycling bin filled with paper and magazines. One of the magazines on top was interesting, so I asked her if I could have it to read if I promised to recycle it when I was done. She said "yes" and let me take it.

3 comments:

  1. That's funny that they wouldn't let you do that--I wonder if it was to discover homeless people from going through the stuff.

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  2. I've always wondered what to do with the 8 old phone books sitting in my closet!

    I wonder the same thing about Goodwill. When I was dropping off some donations, a family came by and dropped off a shelf and picture frame still in their Target boxes. I wanted to ask if I could just have them, but I wasn't sure if that was appropriate!

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