This week's assignment is The Three R's -- Reduce, Recycle, and Re-use.  I thought since today is Earth Day and this month is Arbor Day that we all could share ideas or tips that we use for recycling, reducing or re-using items in our home.  Do you recycle at all?  Does it just seem nearly impossible to recycle?  Trying to catch every piece of trash that goes into the garbage is a hard one for me too.  I have a friend who is very diligent with it and so are her children!  It amazed me to see how they re-spect nature and use the Three R's in their home.  I challenge you all to write about your ventures with recycling, reducing, and re-using your trash and take a pledge to at least try to use some of the tips that you read about on this assignment.  Don't forget to add your favorite scripture for this assignment.

Our family started recycling about a year ago.  It has made a huge decrease in the amount of trash we throw away.  The girls charted how many bags of trash we put out in a month.  Then we began recycling and kept on charting the bags of trash.  We cut our amount of trash in half. 

We went to Wal-Mart and bought three storage tubs.  My husband painting the recycling symbol on them and labeled them.  We keep a small storage tub in our laundry room.  As we use recyclables throughout the day we put them in the small tub.  When the small tub is full, we dump it in our large tubs outside.  Our area does not offer pick-up.  So (usually) every other Monday we take our recyclables to the recycling center and drop them off.  It really is not that big of an issue to take them there. 

We also use the energy efficient light bulbs.  At first it seemed like they were expensive.  So as our bulbs blew, we replaced them one at a time.  Now almost every light in our house has an energy efficient bulb and we have not replaced the first one.  Our laundry room light would blow every week or so.  We are saving money over the long run by not replacing bulbs as often.

We are putting out our first garden this year.  We started composting at the beginning of winter.  We have a small area in the back corner of our yard where we keep lawn trimmings, leaves, egg shells, tea bags, and other composting materials.  This also is very easy.  I keep an old butter tub in my fridge and put the items in it as I cook.  When it is full, someone goes and empties it.

God gave us this beautiful earth to live on....the least we can do as Christians is help take care of it.