Smoke gets in your eyes

And hair and clothes and sheets - yuck!

I almost hate to wash my sheets these days. They're big and bulky and really make my dryer mad so they spend lots of time on the line once a week (when I'm lucky, it's only once). They always come in reeking of smoke. It takes about 2 days for them to smell semi-normal. It seems like it's then time to wash again and we repeat. It gets in my clothes, too, but I guess since they're smaller and have some time in the closet before I use them, I don't notice as much.

Thankfully, it's not cigarette smoke. It still smells pretty vile though because it's from my neighbors (not in the apt, in the surrounding land) burning their trash.

Now, I get that when your whole country is a small island, you can't exactly dedicate the space to a landfill. Chrys suggested that they dump it in the ocean and over time, they'd get a bigger island. Probably not going to make Greenpeace very happy, though. Not cheap to ship it to Texas, even though I'm sure they'd sell them the space. Yeah...looking at the options, burning or recycling are the best.

This puts a great deal of burden on the trash users. We have 4 bags that we use on a regular basis.

1) Burnables - this is where most of our stuff goes. We don't buy a lot of soda or bottled water. Ryanne stinks up lots of diapers. We eat. The cats eat and stink up lots of clay. Yeah, that's a couple of bags of trash a week. We get 2 pick-ups a week which seems to keep up with us.
2) PET - these are #1 plastics. We do 1-2 a month, which is how often they pick that up, too.
3) Glass - We don't use much of this at all. I think we're still working on our first bag. They pick that up once a month, I think.
4) Cans - Again, not much of this. I think we refrain from the vending machines pretty well. They pick this up twice a month. I think we've filled one bag since we've been here, and that was only filled by Owl's definition, not mine.

There are other bags for batteries, pottery/china and other things I forget right now. There are stickers for larger items, like furniture.

I'm sort of bummed that they don't recycle paper, but I guess that may not have survived the cost/benefit analysis. That or leaving paper in the burnables guarantees they have enough to keep the fire going. No clue on the rationale there, really.

Getting used to recycling again has been a little weird. We haven't done much since we lived in Vermont and recycled EVERYTHING. Texas, on the other hand, seems to believe that recycling means using Lance's old bike as lawn decoration. That was harder to get used to. We would like to recycle more so I think that bit of the return trip is going to be somewhat difficult to adjust to. In the meantime, I guess I'll just be thankful that someone burns my trash for me when I get it in the right bag and just cope with the smell of my sheets.