That's especially true in Durham when the city isn't providing the necessary bins to separate the cans from the bottles from the cardboard.

Kermit, hit it:

It's not that easy bein' green

Having to separate your sardine cans from your pork 'n beans.

Recycling starts at home

That's what city officals say

But they don't provide bins to haul the stuff away.

City officials are miffed that Durhamites aren't reaching the city's goal of 40 percent recycling. They're definitely not counting the people who shop at stores like Whole Foods, where it seems that everybody brings his or her own canvas grocery bag so they don't have to decide between paper and non-biodegradable plastic.

Despite those shoppers' efforts, City Councilwoman Diane Catotti was right when she said recently, "We need to be doing more ... to educate and motivate our citizens."

I'm no granola-muncher, but I cringe each time I see someone toss a bottle, soda can or newspaper into the trash. If Catotti and other city officials want to start a crusade to make people aware that there is but a finite amount of space left for our waste, they can sign me up.

You know where recycling really should start, though? In the grocery stores or -- more precisely -- with the companies that make and package the food the stores sell.

Do you have any idea how much space one of those giant boxes of Cap'n Crunch with Crunchberries takes up in a trash can? In a landfill?

I do, because for weeks I've been on a health-food kick and that's been a staple of my diet.

The thing is, though, there is no way those boxes for Cap'n Crunch, Honey Nut Cheerios or the other essential food groups of single men everywhere need to be that big.

The simple reason cereal boxes are so obscenely big is that they provide a larger palette for General Mills, Kellogg's and Post to attract our attention with colorful bumblebees, captains and pirates.

Cereal sales aren't likely to go down if we can't see Count Chocula and Tony Tiger on the boxes. As the noble bard Shakespeare said, "A rose by any other name would smell just as sweet," so too would a crunchberry in any other package taste just as sweet.

Thus, I propose, put that stuff in bags, not boxes.

Even before city officials disclosed last week that we're not anywhere close to meeting our recycling goals, I started my one-man effort to reduce the amount of garbage I send out into the world.

Hey, I heard that, smart guy. For instance, I make it a point to roll my garbage can to the curb every other week instead of weekly, forcing me to cut down on the stuff I toss into it.

The biggest civic sacrifice I've made for the sake of saving our planet, though, was buying some of that cereal that comes in bags instead of boxes.

Bags, obviously take up a lot less space in a landfill than boxes -- if, that is, they're empty.

That's where the problem starts.

I bought a couple of bags of knockoff-brand cereal -- puffed wheat and some colorful little flakes that were supposed to approximate Fruit Loops.

They do -- until you open them.

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