If you live in a small town like me, then you already know it can be quite difficult to recycle. The resources for mass use are simply not in place. In my small town the closest recycler is almost 50 miles away. Yikes!

(the bins above NOT available in most small towns)

I believe this distance pretty much cancels out the environmental benefits of recycling. If one has to drive 45 minutes (or worse) to recycle doesn’t this invalidate the effort? Small towns really get the short shaft when it comes to recycling resources. Whereas bigger cities and towns such as Chicago (my hometown) residents are provided with blue bins for easy recycling and nearby recycling centers abound.

However there are things we small town folks can do to somewhat alleviate this recycling problem. We can still apply the other two R’s, Re-use and Reduce. Below is a list of things i re-use.

Things I Re-Use:

• Milk Containers (re-used as plant containers)
• Paper (use back side, cut into small squares and use as note paper, etc)
• Any and all Plastic Bags
• Pringles Cans (use as coin holders for the kids)
• Composting (the re-use of certain food products for outside soil)
• Old Tee’s (re-used as rags)
• list goes on and one

Another pet peeve of mine, if you will indulge me abit, is consumer packaging. It is completely out of control, i am amazed at times, at the sheer waste in certain procut packages. For example, my roommate likes to munch at KFC (nazi-chicken killers, if you ask me, explanation = i’m a vegetarian) and their packaging is insane. You get gobs of GIANT plastic containers for small food pieces, it is a ridiculous amount of waste. They could easily streamline this up and go with much smaller containers, and sans lids. Improved packaging alone would help SMALL TOWN RESIDENTS who may (or may not) be able to recycle, to curb waste locally.

Let me get back to my post. I see i went off on a tiny tangent there. I reuse alot of items and essentially re-purpose many of them.

Re-ducing and Re-using are but two ways small town residents can turn a negative into a positive. The negative being not many options for in town recycling, and easier access to recycling resources. I would like to open this topic up to you, with a reader question.

Reader Question

If you live in a small town, how do you practice the three R’s - recycle, reuse or reduce?