{"id":3253,"date":"2014-06-01T07:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-06-01T11:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/?p=3253"},"modified":"2014-09-26T15:16:01","modified_gmt":"2014-09-26T19:16:01","slug":"36571-when-50-minutes-1-year","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/36571-when-50-minutes-1-year\/","title":{"rendered":"365+#71: When 50 minutes = 1 year"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Days-365+71-lawnmower.jpg\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-thumbnail wp-image-3254\" src=\"http:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/Days-365+71-lawnmower-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"Days 365+71 lawnmower\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><\/a>About a year ago our electric lawnmower died. I agreed to find a fitting home for its final resting place. We bought a new mower and I procrastinated about researching how to recycle old lawnmowers. Well, it\u2019s grass mowing season again and Jim reminded me of my promise. Spurred on by the recent grim reports of climate change and guilt I realized that if I didn\u2019t do it now, it might stay stuck in a corner of our garage for another year. I bit the bullet. Here\u2019s how it went:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>10 minutes of internet searching and 2 phone calls to find <a href=\"http:\/\/candewrecycling.com\/\">Can Dew Recycling<\/a> which was not only close by but even paid me money for the metal.<\/li>\n<li>10 minutes to help Jim load it into the car. That time included finding some other metal stuff that we\u2019ve been saving for a rainy recycling day.<\/li>\n<li>30 minutes to drive to Can Dew Recycling, drop off the mower and miscellaneous metal, get paid a whopping $8, and return home.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Why did it take me a year to do something that took less than an hour?<\/p>\n<p><strong>6 Lessons learned:<\/strong><br \/>\nMany good environmental intentions fall by wayside because of:<\/p>\n<ol>\n<li><strong>Uncertainty. <\/strong>Not knowing\u00a0what can be recycled and what cannot leads to indecision and thus procrastination.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Not knowing a place<\/strong> to take it all. Curbside recycling is great, but what about metal, batteries, Rx drugs, etc. Once I knew where to take the lawnmower it was easy. Now I\u2019ll readily do it for other metals (and get rich \ud83d\ude15 ).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Inertia &amp; Inconvenience. <\/strong>It can be a hassle to separate trash or find convenient containers to store the various recyclables until you find \u201cthe place.\u201d Reading a blog post like this or having a buddy to hold me\u00a0accountable helped.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Not having a system<\/strong> and practice\u00a0in dealing with recyclables. Recycling papers, cans, plastic, and hard to recycle teracycle objects got much easier once we assigned a container to each in our home. The first 3 items go into curbside recycling. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.terracycle.com\/en-US\/\">Terracycling<\/a> has its own special bin.<\/li>\n<li>Recycling is good but <strong>pre-cycling is better<\/strong>. This means using less items and packaging that need to be recycled in the first place.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Governmental policies<\/strong>. Reducing our household energy use is good but <strong>developing less carbon based energy sources is better<\/strong>. No matter how good our family is about using CFL light bulbs, cloth bags at the grocery, sweaters in the winter, etc. it\u2019s a drop in the bucket of energy savings. Perhaps the biggest benefit of these measures is that it motivates me to get involved in changing\u00a0institutional and governmental policies that continue\u00a0our society\u2019s dependence on fossil fuels. One political step\u00a0is to support a carbon fee that is revenue neutral. This would give alternative energy sources a level playing field to develop clean energy. The best organization I\u2019ve found to put my energy into is <a href=\"http:\/\/citizensclimatelobby.org\/\">Citizen\u2019s Climate Lobby<\/a>.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p>What has helped or hindered your own recycling efforts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About a year ago our electric lawnmower died. I agreed to find a fitting home for its final resting place. We bought a new mower and I procrastinated about researching how to recycle old lawnmowers. Well, it\u2019s grass mowing season again and Jim reminded me of my promise. Spurred on by the recent grim reports [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[28,6],"class_list":["post-3253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beyond-stuff","tag-electronics","tag-recycling"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3253"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3259,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3253\/revisions\/3259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.susanvogt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}