Why I Care
We are often asked, why did you join Green Bellevue? Or how did you get started with living a green lifestyle? So here are answers from our board members:
Ruth Richter: I am a co-founder of Green Bellevue. When I moved from CA to Bellevue, I was given a small blue box (with no lid) to put our recycling in. Since we had a 96 gallon, hidden container in CA, I was astounded and had many questions. Why would the city only be collecting a tiny containers worth of recycling, and... doesnt the wind and rain make a mess of it? Literally, below is what our weekly recycling looked like! So I started to research why recycling was so important in CA but not so much in Bellevue, NE and that led to a WHOLE LOT of things.
I took Leadership Bellevue to learn more about our city and how it operates, having learned nothing about recycling in that program, a year after that I asked the Bellevue Chamber of Commerce if I could lead one of the classes in the program entitled "Recycling in Nebraska". About one year later is when I met Councilman Don Preister who had been asked to form a green team for the city and I joined him in forming Green Bellevue. That was in 2009! When I first started to take leadership to change our city's way of recycling, I thought that recycling was a very good thing for the world and the environment. What doesn't make perfect sense about turning "trash" into usable goods VS. burying it? I had a concern that the "throw-away society" we were all handed down (you can read about that on Wikipedia) was going to become a huge problem in the future and I wanted to be part of the leadership to change the habits and to live a more conservative and minimalist way of life. It was about 2012 when I really started to focus on climate change and global warming.
