Why Can't We All Just Learn to Recycle?

You’re not seeing things—that’s a piano….sitting by a dumpster. It’s being thrown out. It wasn’t a particularly good piano (I couldn’t get it to make a sound), but you’d think its last owner could have found another home for it instead of simply tossing it out on the junk heap, wouldn’t you?

I discovered the piano the other night while out walking with the hubby. He honestly didn’t see it when I pointed it out to him, and he’s got better eyesight than I do. The reason he didn’t see it was probably because there are so many items being dumped in our neighborhood on a weekly basis that something the size of a piano doesn’t really make a mark on your conscious. We regularly spy sofas, overstuffed chairs, kitchen tables, end tables, mattresses, dressers, plastic cabinets, bookshelves, entertainment centers, televisions, lamps, urns, carpets, Christmas decorations, etc., being put out with the trash. A lot of these items we’ve put to good use, too.




And before you ask, yes, we do have mandatory recycling where we live. We have to sort our garbage out into bins for plastics, papers, metals and other recyclable materials. But for some unknown reason, you can’t make people pick up the phone and call Goodwill or the Salvation Army to take away these large items to sell and put the money to good use. Sad, isn’t it?

If you don’t want to garage sale your items, put them on Craig's List, or donate them to a charity shop, people like us will continue to put them to good use ourselves (if we can use and/or move the item—the piano was a bit out of our league). But wouldn’t it be nice if we could all come up with a better alternative to rid ourselves of old furniture items rather than sending them off to the landfill?