Thursday, January 20, 2011

Curbside Recycling WANTS you to be LAZY!

Now I'm not saying they don't want you to recycle, they really do want you to have them come pick up your recyclables. Why wouldn't they? You pay them on average $15 for them to come by once or twice a month and they go and take your stuff to the recycling center and get paid for it to. It's brilliant! You should do it, really you should.

Or...

You could recycle, take the recyclables to the recycling center yourself (saving yourself $15 or so in the process) and then get paid for recycling all that glass, paper, and plastic stuff you burned through in the week.

Hmmm,let's look at the math on that.

Curbside:
Pay $15 a month
Someone else makes money on the recyclables

Net Loss: $180 a year

DIY Recycling:
Save $15 a month, put that money in a jar, literally, get yourself a jar and put $15 in cash in it.

Take the the recyclables to the recycling center yourself, get paid, say an average family may get $10 (This is totally a guess) come home and put that in the jar.

Net Savings: $180 + $10 a trip every two weeks (provided that is the actual amount)
Total Savings Potential: $420


I don't know about you but I like the possibility of the last number the best.

2 comments:

exconsulto said...

Where you live, that works, although too many people don't even bother to recycle at all, just throw it all away. When I lived where you do, I loaded up the car and took it all to Howie's.

Where I live we have mandatory curbside recycling as part of our trash service and I love it. But even with that easy way to do it, there are people who don't bother to put paper in one PROVIDED container and glass and metal in the other and put it out at curbside. That's REAL laziness, and they sure aren't helping the earth!

Jason Palenske said...

True, that's become the problem with the on demand society we've become. When we no longer demand it we just pitch it, everybody is so sure someone else will deal with it.