Taking Care of Business

Second only to feeding the goats at the neighborhood Kinderboederij, the favorite activity for a certain four-year-old in this house is the glass recycler just around the corner. Once each week, or perhaps not quite as often as that, we gather all the empty glass jars and bottles in the house and carry them down the street to the green metal bins. Marked carefully for white, green and brown glass, this receptacle is built partially in the ground and is the perfect height for our little man to heft the bottles into the slot and push them on their journey down-down-down into the deep cache of... what? Broken glass I guess.

Whoosh~CRASH! The bottles slide through the opening and land splat on top, shattering with a satisfactory cacophonous sound.

"Again!" Andrew cries. "Another one!" And we watch bottle after bottle disappear into the deep chasm.

It's always a little hard to wait until the next jar of peanut butter is empty so we can play the game again.

The truth is I have always been a lover of the recycling mantra--reduce, reuse, recycle--but never knew it could be so much fun to send glass on the first part of it's journey to become something new.

I find the double measure of entertainment while taking care of the earth to be extremely appealing.