Yes, you can recycle your…

Over the last 20 years I’ve been witnessing a great transformation around the world and at home; one that has made the throw away world that I grew up with almost entirely a thing of the past. When I was a kid I planted trees every earth day and did what I could to protect the environment. But I was also taking mounds of garbage to the dump every week and probably canceling out all of the good that I was doing. Thankfully a lot of this waste got diverted away from the landfill when our first recycling program began, but that still wasn’t enough. 

The more I recycled the more I realized that we only recycled a few things. Many products that should have been recycled couldn’t go into the bins because facilities weren’t available to handle them. It frustrated and confused me to no end. I simply wanted to recycle everything.

Today it’s hard to find items that can’t go into the recycling. It’s so awesome! Industry stewards, government, service providers and Stewardship Ontario have made a system where we can sort our “garbage” – if we can call it that anymore – and bring it to a depot that will recycle it without any hassle. I’m not just talking about the tetra packs and blue-box items. You can return old oil filters, pesticide and herbicide containers; batteries, paint cans and even pressurized fuel containers can be recycled too. You can even recycle toxic and hazardous products that are still in the containers.

I remember our house being filled with all sorts of unused containers of “garbage” like paint thinner, anti-freeze, fertilizer, paint and herbicides. They all sat in the dark dingy corners of our basement and garage. They were like piles of guilt. We wanted to get rid of them but we couldn’t excuse ourselves for dumping hazardous waste into the environment. So they hung around, for a long long time. In fact, my parents just moved out of our family house after 27 years and I’m sure they found many of those containers stowed away still waiting to be dealt with.

It’s such a relief to know that those stowaway and throwaway days are becoming a thing of the past. Nearly every container that you wished to be recycled can be, along with most of the leftover products inside of them. The progress may have been a bit slow, but those small steps have put us in a position where waste can literally become a thing of the past. We now live in a world where industry, government and consumers are helping each other to rid the world of waste. The first step is with us (consumers) though, so let’s put our “garbage” where it belongs – which is definitely not the landfill.