It's not easy being green

In my mind, it is almost silly to provide people a way to recycle, but also making it extremely difficult to do so. I live in a city where for some reason they think they are really encouraging people to recycle by giving them tiny green bins that can hold less than half of what an average household would recycle in a week. If you actually recycle on a regular basis, the result is lots of overflow that ends up cluttering up your garage, porch. etc. They also have all these rules about how to put your recycling on the curb, separating different things into different specific bags, and basically make recycling about as painless as a root canal.

I don't actually care so much about the overflow problem as I do the concept.

It's like getting one of those letters in the mail that wants you to donate to their cause.

They send you an already stamped return envelope that has already been addressed, and give you free return address labels as an incentive. The message they send is this one: "give us whatever you can, and we will make it as easy and convenient as possible because we really believe in this cause"

NOT..."give money to our cause, but first you have to put this much money in 7 different envelopes, in 7 different denominations, and the 7th envelope has to be pink and tied with a green ribbon."? No. That is the opposite of how you get people to donate to a cause. Yet that is the level at which my city encourages people to recycle. Thus my frustration.

My city is pretending to support recycling because that is what they are supposed to do. So the only way for it to actually work is if people pretend to recycle and throw in a few cans and milk cartons every week. That will fill the tiny bin they give us. This is my message to the city: Support recycling or don't, but by making a half dedicated program, by going halfway, it uses our money and goes to 'waste' anyway. It doesn't actually encourage people to recycle because of it's inconvenience...and yes, I did actually tell them that.

"Do or do not, there is no try" -Yoda