Let's recycle!

Somehow, Monday is recycling day in our household. Maybe it's because the kids are home a lot more on weekends and drink milk like it's water *.* Every week, we drain three to five 2L cartons of this milk.

Seems that recycling is quite big these days? Keep seeing the CNA green plan on TV. Well, Auntie started when I was a kid in the early 1990s ok, with the "I'm a young environmentalist" badge, woohoo!

Then in my uni days, when I discovered that my lawyer friends printed their cases on only one side of the paper for ease of reference, I took their discarded printouts to use the other side to do my maths tutorials instead of using fresh paper.

In my master's year, I rented a room in a house instead of a college community space, and found that the town council provided free recycling boxes so I wrote in to get one for our kerb side :) And that summer, I was in Germany and found recycling bins everywhere. Back then, they weren't as common in Singapore. I was happy to see more and more of them in the past 10-20 years!

Now, there are those big blue recycling bins in every estate. We used to only bring down cardboards and boxes on an ad hoc basis, and worksheets etc at the end of the school year. After I took over household management when we gave up the helper, I bought a recycling bin. So started our Monday recycling.

Truth be told - I was looking for a rubbish bin coz the old one was really gross... And I found these Hållbar bins in Ikea:

10L rubbish bin stacked on 22L recycling bin

Regular NTUC Fairprice bags can fit into the 10L. I fill one or two bags every day, for a household of two adults and three kids. A rectangular ring holds the bag in place very well - in the past five months, I only had to clean the inside of the bin once coz the kids dump pencil shavings all over such that they fell in when I removed the bag *.* 

I prefer this to our old step pedal. I just leave the lid open the whole time since rubbish gets dumped daily so there's no smell. The stacking seems to help prevent pests - no ants or lizards (!) in our rubbish bins for five months now!

I don't use a bag for the 22L bin because recycled stuff should be dry! I let milk bottles air dry on top (where the rubbish bag sits in the picture above) after rinsing them. This size can fit four 2L milk cartons, with space left for other things like a 10-egg egg tray and trash mail. 

There are two lids for this side - I can slide the milk cartons in through the half lid (hidden by the rubbish bag!) instead of removing the 10L to open the full lid. There's also a handle which makes it easier to carry the box downstairs or just shift it to clean the floor.

I first saw these in white but when I was ready to buy, they had phased out the white. But these grey bins also look very nice! :)

Shall end this with two tips:

1. Pack small stuff together in a bag or old envelop to make it easier to move them from your own bin to the blue recycling bin
2. Look here to learn what can be recycled (and what not!) in Singapore - remember, trash belongs to the green bins, not the blue recycling bins!

Have fun recycling! :)