I am happy to announce that my wife and I are going to reside in a community that recycles.

Big deal? Yeah. It is. Princeton, Texas, is like many North Texas communities that place a premium on lessening the amount of trash we toss into landfills. Very soon, we’re going to move into our house. We’ll be returning very soon to the already-huge fraternity of Americans who receive opportunities to preserve our beloved Planet Earth.

We’ll be putting our recyclable items into bins; trucks will pick them up, empty them into bins in front of our home and take the contents to places where they’ll be repurposed, recycled and reused.

We lived for 23 years in Amarillo, a wonderful city that is generally well-run, well-administered and provides the services we all expect to get when we pay our property taxes. It doesn’t allow for “curbside” recycling. The city used to place Dumpsters at locations around town where residents could take items to be recycled. The city gave up on that effort a few years ago because too many residents were throwing non-recyclable material into the bins marked clearly for “recyclable” items.

Amarillo, therefore, is a throwaway community.

Princeton, I am happy to say, allows residents to set aside materials destined for recycling centers. We’ll recycle paper, plastic, glass and aluminum. Cool, yes! You bet it is!

This is an important thing for all of us. My wife and I are fairly dedicated recyclers. We understand the value of reusing material instead of just tossing it into a landfill where it gets buried forever.

I realize this isn’t a huge groundbreaking effort. It’s not a new concept. Recycling has been part of many Americans’ life for longer than any of us can remember. However, for too long I have felt left out of that lifestyle.

I grew up in Oregon, a state that has blazed the environmental awareness trail. It introduced the “bottle bill,” a law that pays deposits for returned glass bottles. Recycling has been a way of life there for decades. There once was a huge debate in the city where I used to work over whether to build a “resource recovery” center, which would recycle household trash into steam energy.

I’m just glad to get back into the recycling game in Princeton, Texas.