Teaching My Parents to Recycle

I have been recycling for years. I’ve taught my boys about recycling and Buddy is the one who would separate it every week before he put it all out at the curb. We recycled aluminum, cardboard, glass and plastic. Now we don’t recycle…at all and it’s killing me.

Source: facebook.com via Andrea on Pinterest

 

My parents just throw everything away! ACK! Can you believe it?! The first time I broke down a cereal box and put it in the garbage can I cringed. They don’t have curbside pick up and weekly take their garbage to the dump.

Recycling is really important to me because it’s just one of the small ways I can help take care of the resources we have and use. So, somehow, I have to figure out how to make it important to my parent as well. My dad was complaining about how the garbage fills up so fast and I mentioned that our garbage could take a week to fill up when my boys and I lived in MN.

That’s when it dawned on me how much our recycling made a difference! We could go an entire week without filling up our garbage and the recycling was put to good use!

For me, we used to just have a couple of brown bags next to our garbage can that we’d fill up (sometimes to overflowing), but I know my parents wouldn’t go for that so I need to come up with something a bit more their “style”. None of those blue recycling totes sitting in the house. lol That would go over like a lead balloon.

I need to come up with something more to fit their décor. I was thinking something like this:

Source: bhg.com via Christa on Pinterest

 

I would have it smaller and probably have 3 of them sitting behind the counter because it would probably be a bit more manageable and less noticeable to company. Then every week my son could do his chore again and help out his grandpa.

Now, I know it’ll be a while before my parents get the idea of recycling, but at least my boys and I can go back to making a difference and be an example of taking care of this world we’ve been given.

Have you ever had to teach someone about recycling? Do you recycle? Any suggestions on how to get my parents involved or at least ok with bringing in some recycling bins?

PS I’ve got two brown bags sitting where that box is in the above photo. At least my boys and I can start recycling. We’ll see if anyone else plays along. =)