Making Tracks

It wasn’t so hard to recycle when the boys were small. It really wasn’t any trouble to toss the glass juice bottles in one bin and the pamphlets for weight loss programs I’d decided not to try in another. But now that they’re big enough to leave six month old soda cans in places I can’t reach, the job is a little tougher.

My first instinct was to don a HazMat suit and spray their room with that industrial strength foam OSHA recommends for cleaning up chemical spills. However, I decided that this wasn’t the example I wanted to set. First of all they’d both want to be the next to wear the suit and the first to spray their brother. I decided on another tactic: put them in charge, a course of action that usually ranks second behind, say, shaving my legs with fire. But I'm trying to pull myself out of the dot matrix printer age and get in step with the times.

Son Number Two, Destructo the Younger, flattens cardboard boxes and maintains order in the mixed paper box. Each warlord, er, boy, gets to enforce the rules governing his domain. (By royal decree, crushed cans go in the Christmas coffee can painted like a Gingerbread Man and flattened boxes go upright in their own tall kitchen trash can--I guess vertical is the new green.)

I let the oldest son, Destructo Senior, be in charge of can smashing. There’s not a piece of recyclable aluminum in the tri-state area that’s safe when he embarks on a tour for additions to fill the Gingerbread Man. From what I can see of the soda containers, our family is responsible for the financial success of not only the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola companies but many of their lesser known relatives and stalkers. If there's a bubble in the can, somebody in my house is going to pop the top and drink until the last drop of artificial flavoring is gone.

So, from what I can tell, we’re doing well on the recycling. But it sure looks like we’re leaving one heckuva carbonated footprint.