A New Game

My household has a new game: "Can we fill it to the lid in two weeks?"

In the words of Bob The Builder (and now Barack Obama)
"YES WE CAN!"

I love... LOVE our new recycling receptacle. My family is going around the house looking for things to put in it every day. It has gone way beyond the standard milk jugs, food cans, paper and cardboard. We are super recyclers now! Toilet paper and paper towel tubes, aluminum foil (no major food sticking to it of course), shaving cream cans, junk mail, all loose paper, and checking every bit of plastic for a #1 or #2. I even noticed that the plastic on the Q-Tip container was #2. Ripped the plastic away from the cardboard... dumped 'em both in. Score!

Taking the garbage down to the street tonight... how easy is it to wheel two carts down the driveway in one trip? A lot easier than making the two trips for the recycle containers (we had one for papers and cardboard, and one for bottles & cans), and then wheeling the garbage container to the street. Oh... and I noticed that our garbage can was the lightest it has ever been.

So once again... a big THANK YOU to Mark Carlino and the Manchester Sanitation Department for bringing this idea to fruition. We love our new blue bin! I think the garbage bins are green with envy.

Great Job Sanitation Division and Thank You BOD!

Single Source Recycling has to be one of the single best decisions that I have seen the current Board of Directors make together to date. I'm sure that everyone, or at least those that are keeping score, has their own top 10 list out there for what our local government is doing since November 2007, but this one goes right to the top for me. It is nice to see what this board can accomplish when it works together. Not only is this going to save the town money after the initial ROI, but it is better for all of us environmentally. Kudos to Mark Carlino and his department for putting this together.

I know that my family recycles everything that we can. EVERYTHING that is on the town's recycling list goes into our containers every week. We even make sure that we recycle the cardboard tubes that toilet-paper comes on. This is going to make our life so much easier, and we are doing right by the environment and our limited resources, AND we are helping the town save money. Looks like a win-win-win to me. (That's probably why this was so easy for everyone to agree on.)

It is things like this that make me think of two of my favorite quotes when it comes to teamwork:

"It is far more important to be able to hit the target than it is to haggle over who makes a weapon or who pulls a trigger." -Dwight D. Eisenhower

“It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.” -Harry S. Truman

I can only hope that the BOD could cooperate this well as we go into the budget silly season. I also hope that I don't see either town political committee fall all over themselves to take credit for this. It's good for our entire town regardless of political affiliation. End of story.