Recycle or Trash It?

I realized today we've been in our Grand Rapids tiny house for almost 6 weeks and we love it! After our first post about The Morton and what life is like in downtown Grand Rapids, we thought it might be fun to continue posting about happenings as our year here continues. One of the bigger changes we've noticed is how much PACKAGING MATERIAL there is in the world. How we had not noticed, I'm not sure. But now that we only have a small trash receptacle under our sink (aka "Dutch Trash"), the amount of items we throw away has gone down dramatically.

We are now recycling as much as we can.

trash_size

(Notice the box of recyled material verse the small container under the sink)

By no means are we a "tree hugging" family, but obviously we want to be the best stewards of the world around us.

It makes me wonder, how many items in the past year have I thrown away that could have been recycled?

Grand Rapids does have a great program if you're interested in recycling by the way. It's called MyGRCityPoints. How it works is the city of Grand Rapids will drop off a recycle container at your home and for every pound of recycled material you have, you receive points. Those points are then redeemable at area businesses. We just redeemed a $10 off coupon at 6.25 Paper Studio right around the corner, saving us 20%.