Recycling in Northern California

This weekend at our neighborhood street fair, we saw recycling, trash and compost bins with these fantastic signs and I started thinking about how lucky we are to be able to recycle so many things in our curbside bins. I think I often take it for granted how green our county is! (Shame on me!)

We can recycle a number of things that you typically can’t recycle in other parts of the country including all plastic types, shredded paper, laundry baskets, lawn furniture, plastic toys, bubble wrap, and household electronics such as cell phones, answering machines, stereos, and home printers.

Yes, lawn furniture and stereos. It boggles the mind.

And we don’t need to sort our recycling! Perfect for busy mothers.

Our trash pickup also includes a compost bin that gets collected weekly. In our yard debris/compost bins we can compost tea bags, bread, vegetables, fruits, pasta and rice, eggshells, wood ashe, and yard clippings.

(While this is incredibly convenient, the down side is that we don’t have our own compost pile that we could use to enrich our garden. We end up buying compost instead and that’s a of a financial bummer.)

And in true California fashion, a keen reminder that our trash doesn’t really go away. Evidently we’re all about laying environmental guilt on you. Sigh.

Sorry about that.

2 thoughts on “Recycling in Northern California”

  1. man, you guys are so lucky… we recycle glass & plastic bottles, metal cans, and newspaper….. and that’s IT. PLUS i’m not convinced the cleaning crew for the building doesn’t just toss it all into one dumpster at the end of the day anyway :(

  2. I think we recycle about as much as Alice. And it sucks.

    This might sound like a dumb question … but can’t you just keep some of the compost for yourselves instead of putting it all out for the town/county to pick up?

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