We expected to give up a lot of things when we moved into an RV and started traveling. One habit we didn’t expect to become a hassle – recycling. Every other day I had an aluminum can of cat food I have to dispose of after feeding our cats; and I will be damned if I am going to throw the can in the garbage! We also have recyclables in the form of empty plastic milk jugs, cans of soup and chili, and cardboard boxes of cereal. Our first RV park had a recycling bin and I dutifully walked over to it with plastic bottles, aluminum cans, and cardboard boxes every time our indoor recycling bin was full but after leaving our first campground in Virginia, we’ve been hard pressed to find an RV campground with any type of recycling container.
The exceptions are Singing Hills in Cave City, KY and Frog Hollow, but both places only offered it minimally. As such, we have to dispose of our plastics and aluminum in recycling we’ve found sporadically during our journey – Vicksburg Battlefield bins, city of Natchez bins, random Walmarts, and Targets. Our efforts searching for recycling receptacles, however, has inspired us to think about the value of recycling in rural areas and how lucrative it is to local counties and states.
I’ve always been someone who tries to find a way to recycle everything. During my sophomore year of high school, I started a quiet personal crusade of recycling. After several years of my school dutifully recycling, the cost of picking up and transporting recycling spiked and the school could not afford to keep up the effort to recycle paper, cans, and plastics. The blue bins were still located in all the classrooms and students and teachers were still using them. I found out that these blue bins were being emptied into the garbage bins by the janitorial staff because there wasn’t any other place to dispose of them. I learned all this because my mother taught science at the school and encouraged environmental-friendly practices like recycling. So, while she worked with her students after school, I went around to each classroom collecting paper, cans, plastics, and cardboard to recycle at home before the janitorial staff emptied the bins. My parents were surprised by the surplus amounts of paper in our own recycling bins, but they didn’t ask about it and I kept it up as much and for as long as I could. For myself, it’s a matter of stewardship of the Earth, I guess that’s what I got out of my Catholic girls’ school education.
Now I understand there are reasonable guidelines of what can and can’t be recycled – delivered pizza boxes, certain plastics, wet paper. But to not recycled at all goes against my nature. During the course of our journey, we’ve been storing our recycling – mostly cardboard since we have found receptacles for aluminum and plastic along the way. But since leaving the Singing Hills campground in Kentucky, we have yet to find a place to recycle it. The pile kept getting larger until we got to Texas. Though the park we are staying at in Livingston, TX does not have recycling, we drove an hour south west to Conroe in Montgomery County and found the Conroe/N. Montgomery Recycling Center. There we met two kind workers who helped sort out our plastics, cans, and glass (another material we had trouble recycling) to be correctly disposed of within their facility. They even told me about a certain number of plastic that could not be recycled at their facility, which I was unaware of but am glad to know. Once sorted, they thanked us for bringing our recyclables and not letting them be disposed in a landfill – it was heartwarming and inspiring.
This experience has sparked our curiosity about the system of recycling across the nation – urban vs. rural environments have different capabilities, limitations, and costs attributed to the institution of recycling.
A few questions that occurred to me:
Can you make purchases that don’t result in recyclable materials? i.e. buy things in bags instead of boxes or cans? If so, doesn’t that mean you’re making more trash instead of trying to keep materials out of landfills by having the recyclable material take up space in our RV?
Can you easily find places in each state to recycle materials? If there is a database of recycling facilities listed by state, I’d love to see it.
Can recycling at RV parks be treated like residential recycling in their cities or counties? Since the majority of the recycling would be residential materials.
We realize that before recycling programs can be expanded to rural areas, it’s important to understand why there isn’t recycling in them now. We are choosing to be curious rater than judgmental about this issue.
