Wondering

Now I'm starting to wonder what types of materials actually go in the trash and with all the advances being made in people's efforts to recycle pickings are much slimmer then they used to be. I didn a program last fall when we made "Alternative Pumpkins" out of tin (is it really tin?) cans but even those could have been recycled. I've got a big bag of plastic grocery bags in my living room I'm using to make plarn so I can attempt to knit my self a plarn tote but even those can be turned back in at grocery stores. Plus I don't even get very many bags anymore because I take my own. What do I throw away? Sadly I throw away a lot of things that I could recycle, and I don't even know why. I realize my mistake as soon as I do it but I'm just like that kid in Chris VanAllsburg's book, lazy.

Here are a few things I know I threw out in the last couple of days...
water bottle
orange peel
gum
laminate scraps
used up Starbucks gift card
candy wrapper
exired coupons
map quest directions
t-shirt sale tag

Watching

Planning programs in a public library means many things one of those is being bombarded with ideas. This is great because it makes coming up with your own ideas easier and the need to do so, if you don't want to, almost unnessary. While I constantly get new ideas from websites, confrences, magazines, listservs, books, and on and on they won't all work for the patrons I'm trying to reach. One type of program that I find my self going to over and over is crafting, especially crafting with materials that would otherwise be trash. I've used old t-shirt to create pillows and bags. That was great because it gave the t-shirts a new use but even if they hadn't been used in those crafts it's unlikely they would have ended up in the trash. Goodwill would have gotten some and so would home rag collections. What I don't see often enough is crafts with things that would truly become trash if I didn't find a way to repurpose them.