Tuesday Tips, Just Another Great Post from Little House. I'm so humble.

This week’s Tuesday Tip, pick up trash at your local park or favorite camp site. It often blows my mind how an entire bag of fast food can end up on the ground at my favorite campground. People should feel privileged to experience the great outdoors instead of trashing it. This weekend while camping, my husband and I walked around the camp site and picked up a small bag of trash. I felt like the little bit we did was good for the park.

Tip #25: Make it a challenge; pick up 20 pieces of garbage at your favorite outdoor hang-out.

• Keep our parks clean. The cleaner our parks are kept, the longer they’ll be accessible to the future generations. I don’t have kids (yet), but I do see the value in preserving our parks and forests for future generations to enjoy. Picking up trash and placing it in the dumpster is a simple step towards cleaner parks.
• Keep our park fees low. Just think, if we all dropped our trash on the ground and didn’t pick up after ourselves, more park rangers and maintenance people would need to be hired. While this may be good for the economy, park budgets are usually the first to be “cut” out of the budget (so no new jobs are formed.) Making up for this expense would either mean closing the park or raising the entrance or camp site fees. I don’t know about you, but I’m already paying $20 a night to camp at my favorite site!
• Use this as an inexpensive exercise activity or game. Keep the kids moving and make trash pick-up a game. Of course, you might want to set some safety rules before you begin; like don’t pick up sharp objects, glass, or toilet paper – that still leaves plenty of things they can pick up, like bottle caps and candy wrappers! The first one to collect 20 trash items gets to choose dessert (or something to that effect!)

A clean environment is a healthier environment.

• One less plastic bag or chip bag is better for the environment. Instead of watching the refuse flow down the stream only to get caught up in a tree branch, make it one less item that will become a catch-all for garbage.

Tuesday Tips, Just Another Great Post from Little House. I'm so humble.

I’ll have to start coming up with a specific way to title these Tuesday Tips, but for today I’m just titling it as week 2. So, for this week’s tip on frugality and environmentalism, I’ll focus on recycling!

Tip # 2: Recycle your own recyclables!

Why Recycling is Frugal

• Every time you purchase a bottled or canned drink, you have to pay a fee for the container. In California, that fee is 5 cents a can or bottle. You can redeem a portion of that CRV at a recycling center. You paid the money, you might as well get some of it back! My husband and I have bins for our aluminum and plastic. Once a month we take in our cans and bottles and receive up to $25 cash back, depending on how much we have (the cash back value is based on weight).

Recycling is Good for the Environment

• Did you know that if you throw away something plastic or aluminum with your everyday garbage, it just ends up at the dump and DOES NOT get recycled? I’ve heard so many people say that their city recycles their recyclables. The city somehow finds the man-power to sort through the garbage dump and pull out the bottles and cans, right? NO!  This is NOT true. Unless you have specific recycle cans from the city, usually one for yard clippings and one for plastic and aluminum, your city doesn’t recycle it. The city has specific garbage trucks that pick up the bins separately.
• Recycling aluminum cans and bottles take less energy to turn back into cans and bottles. Saving energy is important, not only on your pocket book in the long run (think about your overall energy fees you pay), but for the environment, too.

Do you like my Tuesday Tips so far? Have you learned anything new? That’s my goal, learn something new. Maybe Ryan is right, I am my profession. I’m such a teacher (and a complete dork)