Footprints

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 they use to clean 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.

Son Number Two, Destructo the Younger, flattens cardboard boxes and maintains order in the mixed paper box. Each warlord, er, boy, gets to enforce 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, Destructo the First on the Scene, be in charge of can smashing. There’s not a piece of recyclable aluminum that’s safe when he tours the house looking for additions to fill his container.

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