After years of not doing it, our apartment complex is finally going to set up recycling. We've lived in our apartment for about five years now and the fact that we didn't recycle made us riddled with guilt. We've been so programmed to recycle that we tried to do it when we went home and stayed with relatives who didn't have any. We'd leave cans or bottles around in hope s they'd somehow get recycled. Now, finally, we can be environmental guilt free.

But as we've started up with the recycling, we’ve started to remember the downside of recycling, mainly the mess it creates. Our tiny, tiny kitchen is now overwhelmed with bottles and cans and newspapers. By the end of the week, when it's time to put the recycling out, we have so many recyclables left out that we can't do what we need to do in the kitchen. And whenever it rains, ants come out from everywhere as our apartment becomes an orgy of trash goodness for them. It's like they tell all the ants in other apartments what ours is like and so they all come out and join in on the fun. All of this reminds us that whenever we took recycling seriously, our homes looked like trash dumps by the time the week was over. We remember stumbling over newspapers , towers of cans being knocked over and glass items shattering everywhere under the weight of everything.

So sometimes, as we try to make our way through our cluttered kitchen, we sometimes think to ourselves that you know, not recycling wasn't so bad. At least we could cook.