I started recycling stuff when I was about ten. There was a recycling center in Muskogee that paid for newspapers and soda cans (mostly steel back then). I went around to all our neighbors and asked them to save their newspapers, I would pick them up a couple times a month and my Mom would haul me and the papers down to the recycling place. I think I got something like $20 each time I did this.
When I lived in northwest OKC, the city of Oklahoma City provided big blue dumpsters and smaller blue recycling containers, and these would be picked up curbside. Since we moved out to northeast OKC, we are somewhat second class city citizens, in that we do not have fire hydrants or recycling.
One note about the hydrants. We pay exactly the same taxes as anyone else in the city (in fact, more since the houses in my addition are larger and on an acre or more), but the city wanted us to pay about $5K per house to run water the 3/4 mile from the nearest hydrant. So even though our taxes clearly subsidize a new addition at, say, Council and Britton, or the new apartments in Bricktown, the city also wanted us to directly pay for our hydrant(s). This policy, BTW, means we pay more in homeowners insurance. I would state that I have brought this up to our Council reps office (Ward 7), but have never had the courtesy of a reply.
It is even so with recycling. They do not sent the recycling trucks here. I would imagine if I tried to hold out an amount of taxes, the city would quickly send me to jail or something. Taxation without recycling or hydrants.
So I still recycle. We have been collecting our newspapers (I always bring home the USA Todays that I get at hotels), various homework papers that are returned, etc., cans that used to hold soup and veggies (I even cut the labels off for the paper recycling), broken metal stuff, cardboard, etc. Thanks to Nichols Hills, we recently became able to recycle #1 and #2 plastic stuff, like milk bottles.
We stash stuff in Braums paper sacks (for metal and paper), and in Wal Mart plastic sacks (for plastics). Once a month or so, we haul it off. We used to go to a couple places: a cardboard recycling container behind a Panera Bread, the Nichols Hills city recycling center for metal, and our school for paper. Now we are able to take cardboard and plastics to Nichols Hills. I have occasionally (for example, a recent garage cleaning produced huge amounts of recycling stuff) loaded up our Rendevous with stuff and taken it to the Norman recycling center.
I am currently taking our former dishwasher apart to recycle (it’s timer melted into slag, and I cannot find a replacement anywhere; I’ll be keeping some motors and pumps that still work). I offered the whole thing for parts on OKC Freecycle, but no takers.
The strangest thing I ever recycled: My 1984 Toyota truck after the block cracked. I recycled most everything from the cab forward (the back became a trailer), and resulted in about 700 pounds of metal. I think it netted me $80, but it was out of the driveway.
One more thing: I thought about this at lunch, and I think that, on average, of the stuff that leaves the house, we probably have a 60/40 proportion of trash/recycled. Our neighbors on both sides of us are just the two of them (no kids), and yet almost every week they end up putting out two pretty full big blue dumpsters, our friends to the west have the two of them and two girls, and they put out THREE almost every week. Except for recently, while our big house and garage cleaning has been going on, we usually put out one, about half full, and that’s with four of us.
Tags: Freecycle, Nichols Hills, Norman, Oklahom City, Oklahoma, recycling
24 December 2011 at 04:0 |
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