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Green Sex is our regular column on sexual health and eco-friendly romance. Got a question? Need answers? Leave a comment below.
Sex and love are beautiful things, but unfortunately they have become a rather commercialized state of affairs, especially around Valentine's Day. For an intimate experience a person really needs only three things: themselves, another woman/man, and a couple of bay leaves to clean up afterwords. In today's world, however, having sex seems to have developed the required use of various products designated for convenience, novelty, and in some cases, necessity. We are talking about products such as condoms, pill packets, love oils, lubrication, edible underwear, body paints, books, love toys, sanitary wipes, and the list goes on...
After a crazy Valentine's evening of putting all this stuff to (hopefully) good use, if you look around the bedroom the morning after, you will probably see a small trash bag worth of boxes, packaging, instructions, empty bottles, and half eaten boxer shorts and string bikinis. The first question you should be asking yourself, is how can I clean up this mess as eco-efficiently as possible? The second and perhaps even more important question, is how can I make my Valentine's Day less wasteful? Well, I'm glad you asked, let's start with the first question.
Plastic and Cardboard Packaging
First off, please don't just chuck all that wasteful packaging in the landfill because you are too embarrassed to set it out on the curbside for recycling. Even if your 80 year-old neighbor peers over into your recycle bin as his dog drops a bomb in your front yard, seeing more sex related garb than he's seen since Woodstock, that's okay. You might be able to recycle over 70 percent of that plastic packaging and leftover bottles, which is a huge reduction to the carbon footprint of your love life. Just follow the guidelines on the different numbered plastics to understand which ones are able to be recycled and which ones are not.
As far as those leftover cardboard boxes of your love fest go, you have a couple of options. You can either reuse or recycle. One reuse would be creating a few one-of-a-kind cat scratching posts for next Christmas that you Aunt Matilda will neither forget (or forgive). With this scenario in mind, recycling is probably your best option as long as the box material is considered corrugated cardboard..
Recycle Those Broken Love Toys and Spread the Love
Okay, we're not talking about bringing over a box to your neighbor to see if they want to pick through your leftovers. Things break, that's a part of life. But certain things are a little too personal to bring down to your local repair shop in order to find out if they can be fixed. Back in the old days when a sex toy broke, the only thing to do was to discretely wrap it up and throw it in the trashcan to be disposed of in the local landfill.
That was then and this is now. Wherever you may live and play, chances are somewhere within your boundaries is a sex toy recycling campaign, such as Love Honey, a UK based company, or Dreamscapes, a Florida based company. Companies such as these are taking on the noble responsibility of recycling used sex toys and often giving the previous owners a small profit for their efforts. It's easy, all you do is wash your broken toy (please), ship it off to one of these companies, and they will strip the toy of all its reusable/recyclable parts, such as rubber, silicone, plastic, and motors.
So, while you may like it dirty, please keep it clean when it comes to cleaning up the morning after!
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