By LCR Member & Creation Care Team Member Jenn Seley
If I asked you to name days in April 2025 that have spiritual significance, I suspect most of us would list the days of Holy Week and stop there. But what if I encouraged you to add another day to your list—Earth Day?
Many of us were not raised to think of Earth Day (April 22) as a particularly spiritual day. But God made the Earth and then entrusted its care to humankind. Therefore, caring for Creation is a direct way of serving God and doing His will.
This Earth Day, LCR’s Creation Care team encourages you to live into that spiritual service by evaluating your recycling practices.
Our team has compiled the “Cincinnati Region Recycling Guide” to help demystify the recycling process. Access and download the guide online, or find it on LCR's Peace & Justice page.
The guide walks you through what items can go to 3 of our region’s big recycling resources: Rumpke’s Curbside Recycling, the Hefty Renew “Orange Bag” program, and the Cincinnati Recycling & Reuse Hub. (If you’re not sure what each of these programs is, scroll to the links at the bottom of the guide).
The guide also tells you what items cannot be recycled. This is crucial as “wish-cycling”—attempting to recycle items that are not recyclable—can do more harm than good. An item that is not recyclable but included in a recycling bin could contaminate an entire batch of potentially recyclable items and cause them all to be sent to a landfill instead.
No matter what you are recycling or which of the region’s recycling programs you are using, one critical element of your recycling practice is to ensure that all items are clean and dry.
Including items that are dirty is a form of wish-cycling. The dollops of peanut butter left in that Jiffy container that you didn’t want to rinse can contaminate the other plastics it is melted with, leaving the entire batch unusable. Same with pizza boxes. If they are too greasy, the entire batch of cardboard could be ruined.
We hope you find the guide helpful in refining your recycling practice. Feel free to share it with neighbors in our community.
When more of us are recycling properly, the whole system works more effectively to care for God’s Creation.
-
Location