If you decided that you wanted to save the planet, I should not be on the top of your list to assist in the effort.  I know people who are very environmentally conscious and can always identify ways to reduce waste.  There are tons of excuses that I could give for why I’m not capable at this, but the fact of the matter is that this type of thing hasn’t been one of my priorities and I’m not well-practiced at it.  Recently, my wife has been helping me to identify our recyclable items.  She commonly rescues metals or plastics from our trashcan and gives me a stern scolding.  Her efforts are slowly taking their hold on me and I’m starting to recognize what items can go into our tiny blue bin.

Our increased recycling awareness, however, has hit a small hurdle.  Our poor little bin can not contain all of the good-hearted materials that we put into it.  The recycling truck comes every other week and within those two weeks, our bin is overflowing.  (Yes, I’m aware that there’s another problem here regarding the amount of stuff we go through.  Baby steps, people…baby steps.)  So, in my brand new earth-aware mentality, I decided to build something to hold all of our goods.  Here are the requirements that I had:

  • relatively cheap
  • easily movable to the road for pick-up
  • must have separate compartments for glass, paper, plastic, and metal  (the workers currently have to sort stuff out as they go)
  • must allow the workers to easily empty each compartment

With these requirements, and about an hour of free time, I put together the following masterpiece of ecosystem responsibility -

bins1bins2

I was feeling good about my project…until I started thinking about it.  That wood came from some tree somewhere.  Keeping trees living is a good thing.  Cutting them down is bad.  And what about the petroleum and the waste-intensive process used to make those plastic bins?  Not good, either.  With friends like me, our environment doesn’t need any enemies.  There is one small victory in this - at least I thought about it before I went forward with my plans to make it self-propelled with a gas powered engine.

Shallow Thinker - saving the world, one small disaster at a time