I don’t think this is news to anybody if you stop to think about it, but for some reason it really hit me this week.  Perhaps it was because we missed trash day last week.  And perhaps it was because it was really windy on trash day this week so I didn’t put out as many recycleables as I could of lest they blow around and make a mess.

But, we had 6 bags of trash (covering 2 weeks).  Two were exclusively Christmas:

  • Wrapping stuff that doesn’t recycle
  • Broken / old (non donate-able) stuff getting replaced by new stuff for Christmas
  • A few strands of mini-lights (old ones that finely went and are being replaced by LEDs, but we still have one left after this Christmas)
  • Gingerbread houses
  • Packing material that doesn’t recycle from whatever’s been shipped to us
  • Plastic envelopes from whatever’s been shipped to us (we got a lot of those this year and they don’t recycle them here)
  • The wreath – they don’t recycle these here because of the metal frames they’re built on

Plus there is a lot of extra recycling:

  • Wrapping paper
  • Tubes from used up wrapping paper
  • Shipping boxes
  • Greeting cards
  • Toy packaging
  • Cans/jars/etc from Christmas cooking
  • Bottles/cans from Christmas drinking/entertaining

Anyway, I felt a bit odd when I put a 7th bag of trash in the can as I returned it to the garage.  And, I filled half our recycling bin on the way to the garage 10 minutes after the truck emptied it with items I didn’t want flying off.  It will go eventually, but goodness that felt like a lot.  The boys did/will play with a lot of the recycling until it gets too banged up to be useful.  I still have a lot in the house that will make its way out over the next month.