I’ve given myself a great gift this year; call it a field trip, if you like, but I took myself to my town’s landfill and had my eyes opened for the first time. Maybe the concept of someone reaching their 40s and still not being contentious of recycling is one that sounds far-fetched, well, it’s the truth. I didn’t grow up imagining the Earth covered in over-flowing landfills, piles and piles of garbage as high as the tallest building that was not my experience. But because the idea of leaving too much waste for the Earth to handle is a bitter reality today, I’ve begun to educate myself.

I’m fortunate because my children, who are early teens, have been taught about the importance of recycling and the importance of what we need to do to keep the world from being buried in useless trash. They have been paying attention to the lessons that have come their way, where as, I had to see it for myself before I could be motivated to change the way I do things.

The good news is, it only took one quick trip to the landfill, for me to come to my senses and make changes about the way I do things and about the way I think. If we are not thinking globally when it comes to waste, and what we’re leaving behind, we’re not being smart.

Keep the environment safe from harmful chemicals

Is it worth a colony of ants to clean your kitchen floor with a harmful chemical, and that when you dump out the bucket that contains those chemicals, onto the ant hill, you risk wiping out the entire population? Maybe you don’t like ants, and that wasn’t the best example, but you know what I mean. We have a responsibility to the other creatures that share this Earth with us to not purposely do it, and them, harm. We need to be mindful of what our actions are producing and how our actions affect all other living things.

There are so many options for safe-cleaning on the market today that you don’t really have to look much further than your local grocery shelf. Pay attention to the words that describe the items you are buying. Do they contain the words, toxic, poisonous, or dangerous? If they do, then keep reading the next product’s ingredients, there is a better choice out there.

How to prevent excess

The idea of recycling is to reuse an item rather than toss it into the trash and have it end up filling space in a landfill, right? Here’s a thought; why not have the waste in the first place? Are you with me? How can this be accomplished, you may be asking yourself, and that’s good because I have a few ideas I’d like to share.

A great way to curb the surplus in a landfill is to reuse things and an easy one to do this with is the plastic bags you get to carry your groceries home in. Rather than getting the bags home, emptying the contents and putting them away and throw the used bag into the trash, think about the different things you can use that bag for; in my house all of our home-lunches are carried to and from school in reused plastic bags. We even reuse the bags over and again, until we know that nothing will stay bagged but will fall out. Just by reusing items like this will cut down greatly on the stuff that is filling up our precious space-craved landfills.