Sunday, February 17, 2008

It's OK to hug a tree

So, I saw this on the Today show a couple weeks ago and have been saving my catalogs ever since, meaning to do this, but just putting it off....
To give you a little background info. first on how much joy this brings me: I am a card-carrying member of the 'I LOVE TO RECYCLE' club. I don't know why exactly, but it just sort of gives me this saving-the-world-high to put everything that I think could possibly be recycled in our recycle bin each day. It is a little badge on my green vest that we downsized our trash can with the city and up-sized our recycle bin! It's about every other week where, from our little house of two, that come trash day, we have a full recycle bin, but nothing in our trash bin because we often do not compile one full bag of trash a week!
I put everything in the recycle bin from your typical junk mail and milk jug, to a lightly used paper plate. Don't be grossed out, if the plate just had toast on it, crumbs can easily be shaken off to a perfectly clean plate that could be either: a.) used again or b.) recycled into a piece of paper for a young child to one day learn to write on! (And too, I often look for a scrap piece of paper to jot notes on before I'll pull a brand new piece of paper because I feel guilty if something else "junky" is next to me, perfectly able to hold my notes, and gets tossed.) Now, I know the other school of thought here would be, didn't you waste a tree by buying that paper plate? Well, I don't know, you tell me. Because if I had used one of my ceramic plates for my piece of toast, would I be wasting water, another one of Mother Earth's precious resources, to wash it? ....tricky...isn't it? So I figure, use the paper plates and just recycle, thereby saving the world two ways over, (by recycling the plate and saving the water.)
:) *Though, don't get me wrong, of course if the paper plate is obviously used and gross...it goes in the trash...

Anyways, so to get to the point: on the Today show, they did a story on a school up north that made it their project to collect unused catalogs and not only recycle them, but log on to this website, www.catalogchoice.org , and choose to no longer receive the catalog! It's one thing to recycle the unread, unappreciated catalog, but it's a whole other to completely cancel your subscription so that the tree is not wasted in the first place! I got very excited over this.

It just takes a minute to do it! You just hit the "Get Started!" button on the website with your unwanted catalog in hand, and it takes you from there. So when I finally declined my pile of catalogs tonight that have been stacking up for weeks, I felt like I deserved to go buy an Excursion to make up for all the global warming I just prevented. (HA!)

Just so you didn't miss the address...(I feel like an infomercial):
www.catalogchoice.org

And remember Earth Day, April 22nd, and plant a tree with your kids!
:)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I had no idea you hugged trees... I burn em' to stay warm. :)

Aaron,

amyjones said...

Thank you for recycling so my kiddos will have paper to write on!! So now I am going to get a box to recycle paper in my classroom. Go you for spreading the word! Amy