Recycling
Part three of the things I took for granted before traveling
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I have always taken recycling for granted. The ease of access. The expected blue or yellow bin.
If you’re an Oregonian, your recycling and your garbage are picked up on the same day. Wherever a black trash can sits, besides it is a bright blue recycling bin. Not so in many states, as I’ve found as I visit states in an RV.
I’ve been known to store weeks of recycling in our shower, as I trek around the United States, searching for easy access to recycling.
A second part of why recycling is a source of discontentment and contention between the two of us: my travel partner, Jeremiah, doesn’t feel the same passion for recycling.
His rationale: we’re great at reducing and reusing. Recycling is great when it doesn’t mean leaving piles of trash in our RV, specifically taking bags of recycling in and out of the shower repeatedly. (My argument: it’s not trash. That’s the whole point.)
I’m hardcore in the camp of reduce-reuse-recycle. Jeremiah is hardcore in the camp of reduce-reuse. He will always fix something that he can before ever purchasing a new one, even if it means spending nearly as much to fix it as buying new, and he can often be heard saying, “things aren’t made the way they used to be.” (A seventy-year-old man’s quote from a 35-year-old’s mouth.)
Recycling may always be something I struggle with as we travel across the country in a fiberglass box. There are days that I toss my Spicy Water can into the garbage when our shower is full of old junk and our travel plant. A piece of me dies with it.
Recycling is not easy in every state. I have taken many things for granted, but recycling is no longer one of them.
Thanks for traveling with me. This is part three in a short series of things I took for granted before traveling. Next Monday, you’ll be reading about a recent wildlife encounter on the road.