Recycling...

In the states, throwing away trash is not as convenient as back home in Singapore....where you need only to pull open the rubbish chute located in your kitchen, shove your rubbish right in and it gets collected at a central location for pick-up later. We've been spoilt!

Here, we'd need to bring out the trash cans and put them on the sidewalks for curbside collection by the waste management folks who'd come in their huge truck. Trash collection in my town only takes place once a week (every Monday)....so if you are a big family of 6, your trash can(s) could fill up so much that it's not going to be an easy task to drag/carry it out onto the sidewalk.....especially in bad weathers.

If your house is located on a small dirt road where the sanitation truck can't enter....you'd have to lug your trash cans out onto the main road. Tough luck if you are located right at the end of the dirt road which might be a far distance away. Imagine you'd have to lug your trash cans both ways down the long dirt path.

In some towns, there aren't even curbside collection. Residents would have to bring their trash to the town transfer station on their own for disposal. If that's too much of a hassle, you could always pay for the private disposal companies to come pick up your trash. The cost is usually around USD30+ a month.

Our town also provides curbside collection of recyclables on the first and third Wednesday of the month. I've been diligently sorting out my trash into the recyclables and non-recyclables. I have 2 trash cans in the kitchen - one for each type of trash...and it's much easier than we think it is.

We used to sort our trash too back home in Singapore and would use the appropriate recycling bins that were provided in our condo....however, we found that some residents/cleaners were not using the recycling bins as they were meant for. So we'd find all kinds of trash in the bin that was meant only for paper. After awhile, we too gave up on recycling as we always ended up being disappointed to see all our efforts in sorting out the trash going to waste as everything - recyclables & non-recyclables...just got dumped together in the same load into the waste management trucks!

But here, recyclables get picked up separate from non-recyclable trash...so I'm happy to be recycling again. Actually, most trash can be recycled. And 'cos my sink has a built in waste garbage disposal unit which shreds the food scraps into tiny bits small enough to be flushed through the plumbing and into the sewer....I'd usually end up with very little non-recyclable trash (1 medium size bag of trash per week). ..and I'd usually have 2-3 containers worth of recyclable trash per collection.