I really want to see my carbon footprint get smaller, but when faced with a pile of paper to recycle, my thoughts tend to run a little something like, “How do I recycle paper again? Does brown paper go with glossy paper or newspaper? Or does newspaper go with white paper? Or is newspaper its own thing? Or is white paper its own thing? Or is…” You get the point. So sometimes—not often, and I’m not proud when it happens—I end up throwing a piece of paper away because I can’t figure out what pile to put it in; I mean, I don’t want to screw up the entire town’s recycling efforts by throwing some piece of paper into the wrong bin!
It’s for the recycling-challenged (and everyone else) that local do-gooder Teri Kent maintains her website, Better World Betty. With the tagline “Green living made easier,” the website makes reducing Charlottesville’s collective carbon footprint easy by leaving the city with exactly zero excuses. Aside from helping with recycling basics (say, how to divide up that paper) Kent offers everything from a directory of local businesses that swing green (for example, Mudhouse for your coffee and Terra Bella for your dry cleaning) to a blog of her sustainable living-related thoughts to a search tool that allows visitors to plug in whatever it is they want to reuse or recycle; the site will then tell visitors where they can accomplish this goal locally.
This last feature has proved the most useful to me. I’ve had an old PDA lying around the house for a while now, not wanting to just throw it away, but not wanting it to add to the general clutter. I plugged my dilemma into Better World Betty’s search feature and I know now that I can take the thing to Crutchfield and they will recycle it for me.