I've Done it...

I have become the crazy lady at the table!

Macho man and I went out for date night, last might and our appetizer arrived at our table, I noticed the sour cream and salsa were served in tiny little plastic containers. Instantly, my mind went to the question, "Do they recycle here?". I am sure I could have asked, but even if they yes, that doesn't actually mean that they will really be recycling these things. I have recently found out that many businesses in my area do NOT recycle! In fact, there are a few places that have gone out of their way to provide lovely recycling receptacles that have different slots, so you can sort your waste and recycling in to the proper slots but they don't actually recycle any of it. They go out of their way to have everything separated, but at the end of the evening, they just throw it ALL in to a garbage bag and off to the landfill it goes :( How does that even make sense?

Okay, a bit of a rant there! Back to the story at hand. So, I wondered about the recycling and decided that I was not going to leave it to chance, and proceeded to wipe the little plastic containers out (once they were empty) and shoved them in to my purse! That's right...IN.MY.PURSE!! I don't care how weird or crazy that I may seem, I can't have perfectly recyclable/reusable items being thrown in to the trash on my account. If I had thought things were going to come in anything plastic, I would have opted out, but there they were! I was thinking about putting them in with my recyclables but thought of something better. I am going to hang on to them and use them to hold paints for Miss Z, when she is crafting! This way, they will have more than one use and when they become broken or we no longer have a use for them, I will recycle them.

This also has me thinking that there is more that I need to be doing and that I need to make more of an "eco-effort". I think that when going out to eat (which we rarely do), we need to come up with things that we can do to avoid extra waist. Here are some ideas that I have come up with, so far:

bring cloth napkins
ask for nothing served in disposable dishes or find out
bring utensil rolls (in case there are disposable utensils)

Anyone have some ideas that they might like to share?