Recycle more than just the paper every morning

Some recycling decisions don’t start out as greener alternatives. They’re just practical solutions to an ordinary problem. I’ve been a newspaper subscriber for years. And most mornings my daily newspaper is delivered to me wrapped in a red rubber band. We’ve recycled the paper for as long as I can remember, and the same is true for the plastic rainy-day wrappers. But years ago I started a rubber band ball as a way to keep the bands handy and off the floor and away from the curious pets (ingested bands can cause severe damage to animals.) The ball has continued to grow and a few weeks ago I snapped a photo of it, placed beside my coffee cup to show scale, and put it on my facebook page for fun. It was a kick to read the comments about the big red ball. But it was more interesting to read the emails. One close friend wrote to say she is also a longtime newspaper reader. But for years she’s been dropping the rubber band in the trash without giving it another thought before reading the paper. She never considered about how many it might have been until she looked at the photo. But then neither had I, until her email made me stop and think about it. The big ball of rubber bands on the shelf in my kitchen isn’t anything new. I remember a rubber band ball around the house when I was growing up. And it isn’t static. I put one on each morning but I pull off one or two each day. I use them to seal packages of food in the pantry instead of fancy clips. My grown children may live on their own but I still get mail addressed to them so I sort and bundle using bands from the ball. Right now there are two bands holding an old picture frame I re-glued, keeping it secure while it dries. Sometimes I think we focus so much on the trendiest - and sometimes costliest - ways to reflect a greener lifestyle that we forget the basic lesson so many of us were raised with: Use what you have. Use it again and again.