April is the month when everyone turns green for the environment. It’s also the month of Heron Bay’s community garage sale. What a fantastic way to combine environmental protection and extra cash! By inviting others to reuse old clothing and household items, our neighborhood is also diverting tons of materials from the landfill.

You know, we birds have always been good about reusing things instead of throwing them away. Take dryer lint for example. Something you quickly discard would be used by my woodland cousins to soften their nests. Then there are the milk cartons children turn into feeders for hungry birds. Some birds even reuse nests that have been abandoned from the previous spring.

Reuse is second in the preferred methods of controlling the amount of waste we discard. Simply using less stuff, or reducing waste, is first. Then comes reusing what we can so we can avoid buying (and creating) more stuff. If we can’t reuse it, we should recycle it so it can be manufactured into something new. If there’s no other choice, then we can discard it.

If you’re not of the feather to have garage sales, be sure to take your reusable things to a place that will resell or recycle them, such as Goodwill Industries.  It’s the least you can do to help protect our environment.