This is what our recycling ‘pile’ sometimes ends up looking like before I go absolutely bananas and insist that the boys take it to the recycle collection station:

It’s a combination of bags and boxes filled with our cardboard boxes (flattened) and milk cartons, pop bottles and cans… you know, recyclables!  (This is at it’s VERY worst, and only gets this bad when I’ve had a rough and busy week, which this week was – between headaches and appointments and meetings and…. )

I’ve tried this method, hoping that the bags would be taken to the recycling depot before looking like this.  They somehow never do.  Our good intentions pile up larger and larger in the kitchen.

I’ve tried tall recycle bins – one for each kind of recyclable.  I had them inside in this same general location and they just get icky looking after a while.

SO, I moved the bins right outside my back door on the deck, and we even made a sort of table-like-thing to slide them under so that they were covered.  But wind and snow still seem to mess with that method as well.  And the bins got used for apple collection in the fall and aren’t quite the same anymore.  I should gather them up again.  Except that where I previously placed them is right where the new floor freezer full of moose and venison meat is. So there’s no room on the porch now for the bins, too.
I REALLY miss having curb-side pick-up of our recycling.  Since we moved to Canada in 1998 we’ve always had some kind of recycling program that picked-up our recyclables with our garbage.  Then we moved to Alberta and we have no such program here.

I guess I’ll just have to get into the habit of hauling it all off once a week.  One friend told me that I could always just throw the boxes away, and then they WOULD be picked up once a week, with the garbage.  Yah, no… not really an option for us.  We’re committed and trained to recycle now and we’re not breaking THAT habit.

So, if we’re going to recycle, and they aren’t going to have curb-side pick up of recycling any time soon, and I’m NOT going to go completely bananas with all the stuff continually piling up here, I’ve got to figure out a better system (and probably be more diligent with getting this stuff to the recycling depot more often).

Any ideas?