I was sitting in a lawn chair enjoying some sun in the Kawarthas when I realized the environmental problem is more insidious than I'd thought. The can of cider I'd just finished would be tossed in the trash, not into a blue box, because there is no recycling program up in cottage country. Instead of collecting all recyclables and trucking them home at the end of the week, my cans and bottles would end up in the nearby dump.

And I know I'm not the worst of the offenders. Far from it.

Some background. Before I got married, I used to live in a high-rent hovel owned by one of Toronto's seedier landlords. There was no recycling plan for the building, so every month I would gather up my newspapers and pop cans and haul them four blocks to the nearest set of bins. Before I discovered those bins, I brought my newspapers in to work and threw them into the shredder.

At work, I was the ecological champion. I collected the blue boxes under everyone's desks and took them to that same shredder. I took pains to explain to my co-workers how the blue boxes worked - paper only, please - but after three years I gave up. They would not get it through their heads that recycling and garbage were two different things, so every day I would have to pull plastic bags and candy wrappers and banana peels out of their boxes before I dumped the paper.

That was me, the recycling whiz. But then I moved in with a true environmentalist and learned what a threat to the planet I actually was.

"These can be recycled," he would say, holding up the plastic shampoo bottle I'd just chucked.

"You can't put that in there," he told me when I was about to dump some cardboard into the cardboard bin.

"Why not?" I asked. "It's cardboard."

"But that bin," he pointed out, "is for corrugated cardboard. Regular cardboard goes somewhere else."

And he wasn't the only one. I had a major fight with another environmentalist friend when I moved out of my slum apartment. This friend monitored the disposal of all recyclable goods, which meant carrying them to the aforementioned bins four blocks away. When he discovered there was no cardboard bin to be found (corrugated or otherwise), he insisted I bring it with me to the new apartment. When I made it clear I would not, he gave me the look of stern disapproval all cause-fighters know and love; contempt, with a hint of holier-than-thou. I'm fighting a cause to benefit humankind and you are not, the look says, and I'm a better

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