The Older I Get, the Greener I Get

I used to think my husband was mad. He started recycling everything and saved some really silly stuff. I understand now why he does what he does. We have been recycling things for many years now and I seem to get irate at people who don’t. It seems so easy to do I can’t understand why more people don’t do the right thing for Mother Earth.

            Every day we do things to help out the earth as much as we can. We use florescent lights and of course we turn off all the lights and computer when we are done with them (to me this is just common sense). We recycle everything that we can, the only things that reach our trash can is stuff we can’t recycle. I recycle food stuffs in my worm bins; tin cans go to the local animal shelter to help them out with their ever growing pet population. Cardboard heats our house in our wood burning stove along with dead wood from our back yard and any scrap wood we can get. For a while our neighbor was brining us 2x4 ends from her construction job that they just put in the dumpster. We do have to depend on some natural gas heating as well. Plastic, paper, and paperboard (cereal boxes etc.) go to the recycling bin that is 35 miles away, the only one in the area. Glass goes to my mom’s house 2 hours away, since there are no facilities for it in Colorado Springs. We visit her about every three months. We live in the mountains of Colorado and drive to Colorado Springs for work and school. All of my family is in school. My husband and I attend college, and we have a 6^th and 5^th grader. We have taught them to pick up trash on their way home and when we go out hiking. They learn more about being responsible to the environment every day.

We try to encourage other family and friends to recycle as well. I even tried to get the people at my jobs to recycle. I work at an assisted living that does recycle paper, cardboard and tin, a hospital, and well I wouldn’t even know where to start there, although I do know they recycle paper, and a nursing home that doesn’t want anything to do with it. I approached the administrator of this nursing home and suggested it. I even offered to remove the recycling goods. Her response was that soda cans would attract bugs and paper and cardboard are fire hazards. What ever! I started doing my own recycling. The residents save their papers for me and I take them home. Soda cans also get saved and I drop them off at the animal shelter on my way home.

We bought our mountain home 4 years ago. Being starving students, we bought a fixer-upper. We want to put in skylights and solar heating. We are removing 2 of the 5 bathrooms it came with and are turning them into a deck (which is what they were originally anyway). All of the removed fixtures are going to a store called Re-Store. It takes used fixtures and home building supplies and trades or sells them or uses them for Habitat for Humanity homes. The tile we took up is going to floor our kitchen.

We are creating our lives around our dedication to the environment. My husband is going to school for environmental sciences. His focus is Chemistry and wants to learn how to turn trash into viable fuel sources. I am getting 2 degrees. I love the medical field so I am going to school to be a Radiology Tech and I am also getting an associates degree in Natural Resources Technology. Ultimately I would like to have a part time job teaching about how to take care of the environment and a full time job taking Ultrasounds at a local doctor’s office. Being the starving students we are, we live as cheap as possible. No cable, which means no TV watching here, all our furniture came from a thrift store, and a lot of our clothes are hand- me- downs. The only reason we even have a computer is because school would be totally impossible without it. It is also our source for news, weather and communication.

A fuel efficient vehicle is also in our future. We currently own a Jeep but didn’t realize how much gas it would take to drive it up and down the mountain when we moved here. We paid it off and are looking for something that doesn’t depend on gas. We may convert the engine to run on vegetable oil, or find something else.

We are trying a garden indoors this year, since last year we ended up feeding the deer, but not us. It will be in my laundry room, the sunniest room of the house. We hang 95% of our laundry, and the plants love the humidity. The only things I dry are towels, for I just can not train myself to use line dried towels, they are too crunchy!

I wish that more people would learn to Reduce, Reuse and Recycle and could love Mother Earth the way we do. The kids and I are planning our fourth neighborhood clean-up event as soon as the snow melts. Our neighborhood usually does a great deal to help out, and it seems like a lot of people up here have a better sense of caring for the environment and all of the creatures on the planet. We are lucky to live in such a beautiful place and strive to keep it that way.

Here is the website for the great store that reuses used home materials:

ReStore Website