My childhood spanned the 1980s and 1990s, that innovative and, in many ways, more innocent time before the Internet was a thing and you had to get up to change the television station or to redirect the antennae to get a clearer image. Through literature, a magic school bus took us on amazing, educational adventures, R.L. Stine gave us Goosebumps, and we could choose our own adventure if we weren’t watching a reading rainbow. In school, we had programs like D.A.R.E. (Drug Abuse Resistance Education) with the various cheers and chants to remind us that drugs were bad and television shows like Captain Planet where a bunch of kids used the powers of the elements to thwart evil doers’ efforts of polluting our world. We also grew up hearing about the three Rs: reduce, reuse, and recycle. These were the three ways we were taught in elementary school that we could all help our planet if we did our part.

Twenty-plus years later, we read so many different buzz words for becoming more eco-conscious as individuals and as a species. I found many while brainstorming a blog title. Some were kind of cute like “greenie” and “good-for-the-earth” while others made me cringe like “eco-warrior,” which has a more militant vibe than what I was going for. I opted to stick with “Going Green in Texas” because it explains my goal without being superfluous in the lingo. Whether you’re an eco-warrior wanting to see sweeping changes and reforms in your community, state, or country, or if you are like me and want to take steps to change your life and perhaps influence a few others along the way, I think we can all agree that the three Rs are a great place to start.

Reduce.

We are living in a consumer culture. Everywhere we look, we are encouraged to spend and consume the latest and greatest electronic gizmo and gadget, the latest fashion trends, or the newest restaurant with fancy entrees and drinks. Marketing campaigns pop up in our lives like a virtual whack-a-mole through our computers, phones, radios, and in our environment through billboards and scrolling marquees, or even that crazy character spinning the advertisement to help you file your taxes. Our eyes can’t escape it. And yet the very first R, Reduce, tell us to do exactly that. Escape the consumer culture and reduce our purchasing.

Did you happen to catch the Netflix show “Tidying up with Marie Kondo”? I did and while some of it seemed a bit quirky, I liked the idea of asking ourselves if our possessions spark joy for us or did that spark die out once the purchase was made and it was subsequently forgotten as soon as we got home. Reduction can be purging what we have in our home but it can also mean reducing the amount that we bring into the home. Honestly, I wish fast food places would offer us a $0.50 savings for rejecting the toys in the Happy Meals or whatever the child meal equivalent is. Heck, I’d even take a $0.25 savings to not bring one more piece of cheap plastic into my home that will either break or get stepped on in the middle of the night. There are so many ways to reduce in our lives that reduction will probably be its own post at some point.

Reuse.

This seems fairly self-explanatory but I think we need to also acknowledge that reusing something is not merely washing it and using it again like the cloth napkins you typically bring out at the big holiday meals. That is a GREAT example of reusing something and one we can all do fairly easily. I am also referring to using an item for something other than what it was intended. You give items a second life, or possibly a third, by re-purposing it to something else once it outlives its original usefulness. For example, I have a nice, large stack of kitchen towels that have seen better days. They have holes, they are frayed a bit around the edges, they could also be just a pattern I do not enjoy anymore, or they are made of a fabric that is not as absorbent as I would like. They have a second life as my husband’s shop rags. They can blot up oil, grease, clean off small parts of an engine or even be used to block holes that wasps might like to take over as their next domicile.

If my youngest son’s preschool teachers are any indication of those in the profession as a whole, I think preschool teachers have an almost eerie ability to see new ways of using things again. I do not know how many toilet paper and paper towel cardboard tubes I have saved over the past four years that have found a second life in the hands of a preschool classroom teacher. My youngest, M, is very proud of his process art made with those cardboard tubes or I will see snippets of old magazines pasted together to make a new art piece.

Sometimes reusing is as easy as making ratty kitchen towels the next generation of shop rags; other times, it takes a little creativity and ingenuity to see how something can be reused into something else. If need inspiration in thinking creatively, give a child a large cardboard box, markers or crayons, and maybe a few random other bits like paper and tape or a couple of pool noodles or yarn; watch what they can transform that box into. We had a water heater box that began its life as a method of shipping and protecting a 40 gallon water heater. With a blanket draped over one end, it became a cave. My husband can also attest it makes a decent napping location from personal experience. With scissors making port holes, that cave became a jet and a submarine. It became a multi-dimensional canvas for creativity that captured my kids’ attention for hours, their drawings of dragons and aliens chasing around the edges with random letters and words, evidence of penmanship in progress. That cardboard box lived many lives as different things before it became the third R.

Recycle.

Finally, that third R from our elementary school lesson is the word “Recycle.” Its very definition is to “convert (waste) into reusable material” and to “return (material) to a previous stage in a cyclical process” (source: dictionary.com). I think this one component could have the greatest impact on the health of our planet and yet it is by far the most difficult to accomplish for a lot of people for several reasons. When I say this, I am thinking of my own area of Texas where we are a decent size but we’re not huge. We are not conveniently located to a large city where recycling options could be found easier for some materials. Part of the problem could be geographical – we all know the comments about the size of Texas – and part of it is the people’s heart and mindset.

My family was extremely blessed to have the opportunity to travel to Germany to visit my mom a couple of times. She was stationed in the western part of Germany, not too far from Luxembourg, for about five years. One of the first things I noticed on our very first trip there was her trashcan. This was no ordinary trashcan like what we used back home. No, sir, this thing was divided into thirds and was color coded. It baffled me when the lid popped open and I had options of where to put the trash instead of just one receptacle. When I asked my mom about this mutant trashcan because I had a dirty diaper in my hand that needed to find a new home, she explained that they have to sort their trash. You don’t have an option; it is either sort your trash according to the type or pay a fine. I will definitely go into more detail about this experience in a future post but for now, I use it as an illustration to show the mindset of the Germans. Recycling is a part of their culture because they have to. Germany only has so much space and they’re prefer to utilize it for industry, not landfills. The United States doesn’t appear to have that same mindset as a collective country. So, like-minded people with a passion for the environment and living more eco-conscious can do their part and try to influence their social circles to follow suit. Lead by example, right?

The other prong of this recycling problem are the materials themselves. Where I live, we have a small university that offers recycling for a limited list of materials at their offsite location. It’s a central location where the local citizenry can bring the acceptable items in and trucks come from the nearest metroplex and haul it away for recycling. I am very thankful for what we can recycle but the items that we can’t leave me wondering what the heck I can do with them and why can’t they be recycled too. For example, the university has trash bins across the campus that are divided with sections for paper, bottles and cans, and trash. The trash bins themselves are actually made from recycled milk jugs, which I think is fascinating. This is great! We are showing a life cycle: plastic gets recycled and made into something new that collects things to be recycled. There is probably some deep, thought-provoking statement that could be made from that imagery. However, I also read on the university’s website that for plastics, they only accept those items that have a 1 or a 2 on them. The remaining numbers are not accepted. What makes those plastics different and unacceptable at this recycling option? I am not sure but that is something to be explored.

We haven’t even broached the issue of recycling items that are mixed materials such as electronics but we have time. This is a marathon journey for a lifestyle change, not a sprint. We have time. Thank you for joining me! ~ Lacie ~