Stray Puppies

Some people stop and pull to the side of the road to rescue stray puppies and kittens. Me? I stop for stray empty cans of Starbucks Double-Espresso energy drinks sitting on the side of the road. Or, at least that’s what I did today. (And yes, of course I would have stopped for a puppy or kitten. Ask my husband. I have done so before.)

I may have gone over the edge.

However, I have some interesting news. Okay, so maybe it’s not interesting to anyone else, and maybe you’ll read this and wonder, “Why am I wasting my time with this? And why is she?” But I am excited because this week, on Friday, I will have four recycle bins out at the Monrovia Family Festival. And these are approved bins, not like I threw out some renegade illegal recycling bins to steal all your cans. These are bins that have officially been allowed by the company that runs the festival. I don’t know why, besides the hopeful large masses of rescued bottles and cans, this makes me so happy. Except for one thing—I actually got off my butt and made a phone call. And it was easy. And all I had to say was, “I’m doing a recycling project. Can I put out some bins next Friday?” It’s not so hard to ask for help. It’s not so hard to get over that mountain of procrastination. It was just one phone call—or actually, a message left and a phone call received. But, all I have to do now is put out the bins and collect them on Friday. And that’s easy. And I’ll probably still be there fishing out cans from the trash bins. (I don’t know why people can’t walk the 10 feet to the recycling bin, but that’s just me complaining again.) But thank you in advance, Monrovia, for recycling and helping me save 5,000,000 cans.

Grand total: 2957

Busy Bee Apology

Okay, so two things. One, my last article was a bit preachy. But it gets me angry when people just refuse to recycle. Very irksome. Even more so when they have an easy way to do it. It’s so easy! Really! (But I must stop myself before I get going again.)

And two, I have been absent for too long. Since my last rant, um, I mean message, I have recycled another 102 cans and have bags and bags sitting outside my back door. Also, I got a chance to attend Lilith Fair in Irvine. I never had the opportunity to visit the first Lilith Fairs in the ‘90s, so I really wanted to go to this one. While there, I saw the Reverb table. Reverb is a company that helps “green” music tours and festivals. I first heard of them when reading about the Barenaked Ladies Cruises. They did enough carbon offsets and recycling that the cruise didn’t actually have as much of an impact on the ecosystem. (Not sure how that works, exactly, but every little bit helps, right?)


But Reverb was asking people to make a pledge, so I made mine.
I actually made two – one, with my friends to “Reduce, Recycle and Reuse”
and the second, to “Work Towards a Sustainable Future.” I figured I was already doing these, so I might as well pledge it officially somewhere.




Other things I was able to do this week, I threw a baby shower for my best friend and since times are tight, instead of doing lots of flowers for the baby shower, I asked my neighbor if I could have some of the lemons off her tree. She says she had too many to use anyway, so we filled some old vases with lemons and tied them with pink streamer. How’s that for reusing? And we decorated with some old pics of the mom and dad to be as babies. More reusing—thanks for the old pics, grandparents to be.

And my husband found something else of interest—our trash service, Athens Services, offers an extra 90 gallon recycling bin free of charge! So, we asked them to deliver another one so I can recycle the shredded paper from my husband’s office and hopefully, whenever I get a job, I can recycle anything from there too (if they don’t recycle already). I also offer to recycle for anyone else who doesn’t have access. If you have Athens Services, call 888-336-6100 and they’ll bring you a free recycling bin. All you have to do is fill it with recyclable material!

I hope anyone reading can find a way to go even greener and keep on keepin’ on, as they say. Every day we get closer to our goal.
Grand can total: 2722.

Thank you to my brother, who is remembering to recycle and helping out his niece and nephew at the same time. (And thanks for the babysitting too, bro.)

Recycling is a Pain in the Butt

But everyone should still do it. To not recycle in this day and age is plain lazy, especially in a metropolis area like Los Angeles. Now, I hate to be preachy (too late) but one of my friends “back home” had to drive out her every day trash to the dump herself. Luckily, most of us have trash pick-up. Many of us even have curbside recycling. I use both, although we try to make it a priority to make sure the recycling bin has more in it than the garbage bin. Now, you don’t have to make the extra step to return your recycling for cash. As my brother says, it hardly seems worth it. And in other states, you may not get anything.

That being said, not being wasteful is a duty for us all. A duty. Now, I don’t care if you have enough money to buy a million cans and toss ‘em with out a second thought. I don’t care if you don’t have enough money to have a recycling pick-up at your building. There is always a way to recycle, and it probably isn’t that difficult. Someone said to me the other day, “Well, we don’t get many cans and bottles.” One quick glance into their trash can, and I saw two Gatorade bottles. I don’t know what I would have found if I had peeked into their other cans, maybe nothing, maybe a half dozen water bottles. But I feel that it’s a shame for anyone to toss a can into a landfill. Yeah, what’s one bottle? What’s one can? Well, so far, one bottle or can at a time, I have now collected 2620 cans, worth $131.00. And I don’t go out of my way to spend all day looking for bottles. I don’t stop the car on the freeway to clean up cans on the side of the road. I accept my friends’ cans, some from my family, and pick up after 4th of July or concerts that I attend. One bottle at a time, I’ll pay for my kids’ college. And other people are throwing it away.

Please, teach your family and kids to not be wasteful. Teach ‘em to recycle.

Happy IndeCANdance Day!

Happy IndeCANdance Day!

You know, I don’t want to say that my journey is anything like the huge journey that our forefathers took in getting to this country, leaving their homeland and defeating their former king, but I will honor those women and men who took that journey in saying this:
“The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

Those people had to make the decision to start. They had to make the decision to pack up and get on the boat. They probably never imagined that 243 years later, not only would they have been successful in making their own country, but that that country would be one of the leading global superpowers (even if we’re in a bit of turmoil now.)

So, I made the decision to get five million cans. Now I need to stick with it until it’s a success. It’s as simple as that. This is a big journey for me because I have to teach myself that it’s okay to ask others for help. It’s okay to persuade others to start something beneficial to themselves, the Earth and, well, me. That’s going to be the biggest obstacle for me, because the rest is just getting cans and recycling them.

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July. I honor my relative, (Great x 9 Grandfather or Uncle), Captain John Stacey, who fought in the Revolutionary War. I gotta say, we have it good compared to them and thanks to them.

I want to thank all those who donated cans and bottles—Study Circle Preschool, my Grandma Joy-- and to remind the people who left cans and bottles in the trash cans around Library Park this past Sunday that nothing disappears. There are things we remember forever and there are other more physical things that never disappear.

This week:198 cans and bottles for a total of $9.90
Grand total: 2462 and $123.10

The Helpful Husband Recycles, Part 2

Some men bring home roses. Some men bring chocolates. Some men make late night ice cream-and-olive shopping trips. (Okay, that was my man too.) But my man brings home a car full of recycling.

Sadly, his office doesn't recycle paper or cans. So he frequently brings home a box of shredded paper to throw in our recycle bin. Sometimes he brings a bag of cans and bottles. But this week, my hubs had call to actually drive the car into work instead of taking the metro and came back with three huge trash bags full of cans and bottles and two heavy boxes of paper. Added to our usual weekly findings on walks to the park, outside Target, walking the dog, helping friends move, on the ground outside daycare, at the movies, -- Toy Story 3 is ALL about recycling-- we came up with 351 more bottles. That is $17.55 that people have thrown away.

Seems like a lot of money, until you realize that (according to bottlesandcans.com) Californians throw away $300 million last year.

Either way, it brings our total to 2264! Over the 2,000 mark and getting closer to our goal all the time!

Grand Total: 2,264, or $113.20

Check us out!

I have to thank Jenny Platt for writing about us for both SoCal.com and Smart2BeGreen.com!

If the links aren't working, I will copy them here.
Here's the SoCal.com article:

Local Mom Turns your Trash into Cash

By Jenny Platt

Like many parents, Kim Rily wondered how she and her husband would provide for their two young children on a single salary when the company she worked for unexpectedly handed her a pink slip last March. But instead of turning to despair, she embraced her newfound time by starting the Five Million Can Project. Rily, a self-described “youngish mom who is trying to take care of her kids’ future and the planet too,” has created a blog to document the progress of her goal: to recycle five million cans (and bottles), using the CRV (California Redemption Value) she collects for her kids’ future college educations. “I try to pick up trash when I see it outside,” Rily explains, “and I actually started having discussions with my husband and friends where I said, ‘well, a can is worth a nickel, or sometimes a dime, and wouldn’t you pick up a nickel if you saw one?’” It was actually the trash left behind at a movie theater that inspired this mom to become the “Can Mom”. Recalling that eventful night, Rily shares, “people just left their bottles all over the theater and I knew they weren’t going to be recycled – they would just be thrown away. So I started picking them up…there were so many juice and water bottles littering the theater that my husband and I couldn’t hold them all.” But while she began doing the public’s dirty work at the theater, Rily didn’t come up with the idea for her blog until the following day. Collecting miniscule unemployment checks, she admits, “I was kind of freaking out about how much things were costing, like daycare. The idea of transferring something seemingly difficult to earn, like $250,000 for two college educations into something easy, like finding cans, came together. It took me a while to get up the guts to make the blog…but after I made it, I really didn’t want it to be something I failed to pursue.” Rily now carries collection bags in both her purse and her car, just in case any extra “nickels” are lying around, whether it’s at the park, in the parking lot, or even by the side of the road. “The hardest part to get over is the idea that people are going to stare at me because I’m reaching into a trash can. I know I’m drawing a fine line between being an eco-activist and a bag lady,” she remarks. “But there are other things that are happening. My daughter is becoming more aware of recycling. I never thought a three-year-old would ask, ‘is this trash or recycling?’” Rily often brings her daughter Samantha and her one-year-old son Max recycling. Her kiosk of choice is an automated machine next to a local Albertson’s that counts her cans and dispenses a refund ticket accordingly. A blog entry from June 4th proves just how much of an impact this has had on Samantha. “Recently, I've been bringing the little girl with me to the point where now she got angry because I only had 37 cans and let her sit and watch me deposit the recycling instead of getting her hands dirty and sticky. She yelled at me afterwards, ‘I didn't get to help with the cans!’ She knows about recycling and is enthusiastic about it. She CRIED about not recycling cans. Cried. I’m so proud.” It may seem as though life in the Rily household has been dramatically affected by multi-weekly recycling trips or that bottles and cans have overtaken their home. But other than her outspoken husband Mitch asking strangers for cans, not much has changed, and the Can Mom shrugs it off, defending her new eco-lifestyle. “It hasn’t slowed me down at all. The other day I was driving home from Target and someone had left a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi in the parking lot, so I stopped the car for a second and put it in a bag in the car. Five seconds here, five seconds there, that’s all it takes.” Almost four months have passed since the Five Million Can Project’s inception and Rily has collected nearly 2,000 cans for a grand total just shy of $100 – a far cry from the $250,000 she hopes to acquire. But she’s not giving up and she brushes any thoughts of failure aside; for her, this is just the beginning. “I don’t know if I can make it by my daughter’s fifth birthday, like I had initially written in my blog, but I really do think I can achieve this goal. This whole thing is educating me just how much a million is. But we'll keep at it!” Five million may seem like an unfathomable amount of unclaimed recyclables, but according to www.bottlesandcans.com, over seven billion cans and bottles were tossed into trash cans in California alone last year. So, what does Rily think of this astonishing number? “Hmm…all that stuff isn’t getting recycled,” she says, without missing a beat. “I’ll take that.” Her motivation may have been to reverse the damage done to college funds after she lost her job, but Rily swears, “this project isn't just about getting money for my kids' educations. It's also building this sense of accomplishment for me and for the community. Just think if everyone saved their bottles and cans, recycled them, and donated them. How much money could they raise? Or, if everyone decided not to use bottles and cans. Think how many landfills wouldn't fill up as quickly. When we work together, it becomes very doable. And that's something I see as I work on this more and more. I've noticed other people picking up cans and bottles. I'm not alone. And that makes me happy.” It might seem that Rily would be eternally grateful to all of the strangers across Los Angeles who have unknowingly contributed to her kids’ college savings accounts. However, she can’t quite bring herself to thank people for littering the city’s streets. “While I’m glad that there is a way for me to find a little ‘easy money’, I really wish that everyone would take responsibility for their own actions, and their own waste,” she says. “I wish that everyone recycled and this wasn’t even an issue. If my blog could bring into people's consciousness that they are throwing away something that is a: worth money, b: is a valuable resource and c: is just uselessly filling a landfill, I'd love it.” In spite of wanting others to do their own recycling, several people close to Rily have earned her deepest gratitude for doing just the opposite. “To my friends and family who have donated their cans and bottles, and my husband who has dragged bags of bottles and cans home on the Metro, I thank you so much for contributing and believing in me.” So what’s next for the Five Million Can Project? Rily plans to seek out partnerships with businesses in her neighborhood that may not already be recycling, perhaps to trade their cans for links to their websites on her blog. To donate your recycling refund via Paypal or to follow Can Mom’s progress, visit www.fivemillioncanproject.blogspot.com.

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And here's the scoop from Smart2BeGreen!

June 15, 2010

Where Can You Find Extra Money?

If you pick up another man's trash
You can turn his old junk into cash
It may take awhile
But you'll show your green style
And soon you'll have quite the big stash.

Show Me the Money

Even when times aren't tough, it's nice to make a few extra bucks on the side for doing something you believe in. So what's the best way to profit off your green ways?

• Recycle it Yourself - The contents of your household's recycling bin may get collected once a week, but it's not all that hard to do some of the work yourself - and to benefit from your independence. Locate your nearest recycling center or kiosk, then separate out all your bottles and cans. If you walk or bike to the center with your bag o'loot, you'll pull double duty for the environment and your wallet by saving on gas and preventing unnecessary air pollution.
• Make it a routine - Head over once a week with your recycling booty and keep the money you make in a jar or make a chart to show how much you've earned.
• Save your profits and have a lofty goal - A handful of change each time you go may not seem like much, but it can add up quickly. One blogging mom started the Five Million Can Project, determined to collect and recycle five million cans over the next several years to pay for her kids' college educations.
• One man's trash can be YOUR treasure - Train your eyes to look for abandoned plastic bottles and cans and see them as found money - on the subway, at the movie theatre, at the beach. Carry a bag with you in your pocket or purse for collecting - a simple bottle of hand sanitizer should chase away any fears of touching used beverage containers.

Another way to save money by utilizing your eco-friendly ways is to monitor your home utility usage with My Emissions Exchange, where your carbon credits are traded and you earn cash through PayPal!

Earth911 provides a list of additional ways you can earn money for recycling anything from electronics to clothing.

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Thank you SoCal.com and Smart2BeGreen.com! And thank you, Mrs. Platt, wherever you are!

The Helpful Husband Recycles

Doesn't that sound like the title of a 1950s how-to book?

I don't know how your spouse acts, if they're chatty or shy, a doer or a thinker. My husband is definitely not shy and is definitely a doer. He works in downtown L.A. and got off work early because of the Lakers game. (They are usually cautious about anyone getting caught in downtown if there's a win OR a loss.) So, wonderful man that he is, he stopped off at the L.A. Convention Center (not the Staples Center) where they're having a certain yearly electronics convention. He stopped by there, did a quick walk of the convention, and in 3 minutes picked up a trash bag full of cans that had been thrown into the trash. Mind you, there are recycling bins right next to every garbage can there. Somehow, the cans and bottles just didn't make it into them. So, thank you, sweetie, for the $3.50 in cans and bottles you were able to get by making a quick stop on your way home.

And gamers! I know you're distracted by the booth babes, but come on! Just take a look and put the bottle in the right container!

Also, a friend this week donated her cans and bottles on Wednesday. I didn't know people drank so much Perrier.

Another $5.10 (102 cans) in just 2-3 more days.

New Grand Total = $95.65, 1913 bottles and cans