Looking to increase your daily angst and whip up a household organization frenzy? Here are some ways to get started.

Paper

Separate colored paper and computer paper into hand-labeled cardboard boxes. Spend time wondering at what point white paper printed with lots of ink becomes colored paper.

Place the magazine carcasses from your art projects in yet another cardboard box, this one designated for “shiny paper.” Decide that canned food labels belong in this category. Every time you receive one of those glossy cardstock fliers—a car dealership scratch-off card, a city council campaign advertisement—ask yourself, how shiny is shiny? Followed by how thick is cardboard?

Hoard bubble mailers and big envelopes in which you’ve received packages until your collection resembles that of a small-time Etsy vendor. Occasionally mail gifts (or return a vacuum cleaner part to a former landlord—hopefully only once) inside these saved materials. Accept that the rate of sending will never match the rate of receiving.

Discover that cartons are not recyclable in Missoula. Rinse out cow milk, almond milk, tomato soup, and chicken broth cartons and leave them upright and open for a few weeks. Pretend the interior of a container with a hole the size of a nickel can dry out fully in this manner. When you visit your family in Bellevue, Washington, flatten these cartons and pack them in your suitcase to recycle at their house, where the blue bin is so flexible, so undiscerning.

With a hand-me-down printer and cartridges that you refill in town, print everything one-sided on the backs of papers you’ve salvaged for years—lab notes from college chemistry experiments, math assignments from grade school saved for posterity by your parents, leftovers from that time you ill-advisedly printed hundreds of posters with your face on them. Familiarize yourself with the innards of the printer by extricating the ripped, inky aftermath of multiple paper jams. Learn to check the re-used paper for staples.

Glass

In the beginning: struggle to find anywhere to recycle glass other than Bayern Brewing, an establishment that only accepts twelve-ounce brown bottles. Respond by stockpiling jars and pawning them off on your roommate to stuff in her luggage when she flies somewhere. Chuckle at her account of setting her noisy maroon backpack on the conveyor belt at security and blurting an apology at the TSA officer for all the clinking. Think about the hypocrisy at work, about what evangelism you’re performing, because somehow your concern for this glass does not translate to a desire to, say, bike from Missoula to Seattle and avoid the air travel emissions.

When an organization called Recycling Works starts collecting glass in Missoula to ship it to a Salt Lake City processing center, don’t spend your money on the pick-up service. Surreptitiously deposit soda and salad dressing bottles in the bins in the restaurant section of the Good Food Store—without buying a meal—like the renegade you are. Forgiveness, not permission.

Bide your time: the university radio station will begin paying for two Recycling Works bins on the ground floor of the student union building, and you will be able to walk or ride less than a mile to drop off your glass. Bask in the relative ease of this process.

Plastic

Store empty bread, cereal, and bagel bags in a drawer until you reach critical mass and then shove them in the take-one-leave-one-dog-poop-bag dispenser at the park. Begin to purchase bread from a local bakery because it’s delicious but mostly because it comes in a paper bag.

Carry a spork and a collapsible cup in your backpack. In situations where you end up eating with disposable utensils anyway, bring them home to clean and then add to the stash in the glove box of your car. Charm a flight attendant into serving you juice in the cup, even though it’s against airline rules.

During the slow process of breaking up with single-use plastic, collect toothpaste tubes, floss containers, empty deodorant sticks, and worn-out toothbrushes over the course of a couple years to mail a package of them—in one of your saved bubble mailers—to the free Tom’s recycling program.

Save twenty-five cents on hot drinks by taking a mug to any café on the university campus. On occasion, find yourself craving coffee, but mugless. Buy a latte anyway. Recycle the cardboard sleeve. Rinse the No. 7 lid and add it to the bag of material to pack out on your next trip, because only plastics 1 and 2 are recyclable in Missoula and only sometimes.

Buy agave fiber sponges and filmy, biodegradable soap for washing dishes. Discover that the sponges disintegrate far more quickly than their plastic counterparts and the soap can’t really cut through grease. Console yourself.

Squish plastic film that isn’t too difficult to clean—shrink wrap, hole-ridden Ziplocs, the gigantic bag swaddling your friend’s new futon—into buckets and boxes. Pray that what you drop off at an Albertson’s receptacle will actually become composite lumber, as promised, and end up part of a deck or something.

With a cheap iron from Goodwill, take matters into your own hands. Fuse single-serving snack wrappers, frozen-fruit bags, toilet-paper casing, chocolate chip packaging, et frickin’ cetera, into multi-colored sheets. Avoid fume inhalation by wearing a paint respirator. Imagine that this device will figure prominently in the iconography when they martyr you.

Fabric & Miscellany

Indulge a certain anguish about throwing away objects you didn’t ask for, such as the foam pads in sports bras. Shuffle them around your apartment for weeks. Do not listen to a friend who says it might be okay to let this one go. Wait for epiphany to strike, then: stuff the bra pads into hanger clamps that used to leave marks on your slacks. Practically sparkle with joy.

Take your old Washington license plates to an eco-gift shop that will re-distribute them to an artist. Talk to the owner about the cycle of saving metal bottlecaps for some future project and then giving up and throwing them away. Nod politely as he explains his goal of 80% recovery, as opposed to 100% perfect recycling. Wonder if he’s sensed something about you.  

Contemplate whether there’s any way to re-use underwear with which you’ve decided to part ways. Learn that you could sell it through the online marketplace Sofia Gray. Conclude that this might be a bridge too far, recycling-wise, even if you support decriminalizing sex work.

Dispense of a tea bag by deconstructing it: the tea and its sachet go in the compost bucket, which a SoilCycle employee on a bike empties and scrapes once a month; the blue tag from your favorite flavor, licorice mint, goes in the colored paper box; and the tea-stained string goes in the garbage can—make your peace with this. Dream of the day you’ll switch to loose-leaf. In the meantime, drink the enormous quantity of packaged tea you already have, acquired by way of your mother by way of Amazon, a company to which you have finally stopped giving your money. Except for that obscure book of poetry.

Get a Cora Ball to trap microplastic fibers when you wash clothes. Periodically wonder why the ball appears to not collect anything besides your hair. Because Chinese policy changes revealed serious flaws in the US recycling system, and because the “micro” in “microplastic” means “too small to see,” decide for your own sake to believe that something is happening.

When It All Gets to Be Too Much

Ruminate about whether the tea bag disassembly ritual is evidence of great optimism, a belief in the power of small actions and their immeasurable cosmic ripples, or whether it is evidence that you’re lost in the weeds of proving you deserve a spot in greenwashed heaven.

Wish, briefly, that you could make like Thoreau and move to the woods (or at least the Lower Rattlesnake). Discover that good ol’ Henry D. actually lived in a park and that his mom did his laundry. Disabuse yourself of the fantasy of living in a forest. Remember that you like indoor plumbing and going to the mall sometimes.

Notice that all this effort is time-consuming and, on some level, a way of distracting yourself. Admit, finally, that recycling cannot save the earth. Feel a perverse sense of relief at this realization. Commence waiting for capitalism to implode. And until then, maintain the charade. You can’t quite bring yourself to give it up.