Reuse

So, yesterday marked our first trip to recycling! We packed up the stuff I'd been saving for probably 3 weeks now and turned it in. It felt good.

So, this is random, but oh well, that's me.

Every time I go out to the car, I see all the trash on the ground. Grocery bags, soda cans, etc. After feeling all good about myself for recycling, I got mad at the people who couldn't take their trash the extra 100 feet to their apartment or the extra 40 feet to the dumpster. So today, I decided, enough was enough. I took a grocery bag of my own down to the parking lot and filled it with trash.

Here are some of the things I found in the precipice-like piece of land next to my parking lot.

2 brake pads (about 15 feet apart and partially obscured by grass)
grocery bags
part of a soda can
some random candy wrappers
styrofoam chunks
part of one slat of the large vertical blinds used for balcony entrances
Part of a wooden pallet (I might grab that later and turn it into a frame for my tomatoes)
a 4x8 foot piece of particle board

I put what I could of it into our bag for recycling, but really most of it wasn't recyclable, and threw out the rest. I wasn't able to get the pallet or particle board. I washed and kept the part of the blind slat. No, not because I'm a pack-rat, because just the other day I had read a post about how useful old blinds were for turning into markers for your garden. So I happily cut it into sections and got about 18 markers--for free!

I know I'm absent-minded enough to forget which pot I put what in, so this will be nice. Especially when it comes to planting different varieties of the same plant like tomatoes.

Does anyone know if you can recycle brake pads?