Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun

Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun’s mommy always told me that it’s rude to let someone clean up after me if I’m capable of doing it myself. Sure, she washed my dishes and did my laundry for a good number of years, but the lesson took! Same thing in the Scouts. You bus your own tray, you clean your own tent, yada yada yada. Combine that with my powerful and innate sense of guilt, and you can imagine how I look sideways at the principle of single-stream recycling.

Boston, along with a lot of towns and institutions, have single-stream recycling. The idea is that you treat your recyclable materials just like you treat your garbage: chuck it in one bag or container and let the truck take it away to, I dunno, whatever magic place turns it back into cardboard boxes and beer cans. The actual process of separating the paper from the plastic from the metal is pretty cool, if you like giant machines and flying garbage. Which I do.

Looks legit enough, but I still feel weird about it. One of the primary and most intuitive virtues of single-stream recycling is that it’s so easy, even a monkey could do it. Check out this list of acceptable materials from the City of Boston. Basically, as long as you put it in a clear plastic bag and it’s not a rod of enriched uranium, the recycling truck will pick it up. Which is great. Recycling is obviously more effective if everyone, even the lazy idiots, do it.

However, comma, I personally don’t feel unduly burdened by separating my recyclables. This isn’t rocketry, folks! And it’s not particularly labor-intensive either. You put the bottles in one bucket, you put your paper in another. Boom. Of course, since I live in a single-stream community, my separating skills have atrophied like so much…I dunno, atrophied stuff.

Here’s the problem. Anyone that lives in New York or Massachusetts or Michigan or any of the other bottle deposit states knows that a significant amount of recycling is done by homeless folks returning cans for the five (or 10) cent deposit. No one disputes this. That’s why, even though recycling is only collected on Friday mornings, it’s feasible to put out a bag of cans any night of the week. Someone will pick them up. Happens every time.

So you can imagine my surprise when, on my way to the T this morning, I saw a familiar-looking bag on the street a few blocks from my apartment. Empty handle of Jim Beam: check. Six wine bottles from Tuesday’s book club meeting: check. Juice cartons and Pringles can: check. It was the bag of recyclables I had put out the night before! Except all the beer cans were gone. I can only surmise that some can person grabbed our bag, sorted out the useful stuff from the dregs, and then dumped the bag. The recycling truck was long gone, so this bag would probably just get picked up by a public works functionary this weekend and get mixed in with the regular garbage. You know, hence defeating the purpose of recycling in the first place.

I refuse to believe that this doesn’t happen ALL the time. Why wouldn’t it? Boston is notoriously bad at distributing recycling bins, so most of the people who recycle things at all are putting their junk in bags. Why wouldn’t a bag man just snag a whole block’s worth of recycling sacks, take them to his base of operations, grab all the goodies, and leave the dreck? It makes perfect sense! How many tons of recyclables are lost to the normal garbage every year? I demand statistics. Does the amount of garbage lost to situations like the one I just described offset the amount of recyclables gained by people being drawn in by the ease of single stream? That’s a serious question. One that this blogger is too lazy to investigate himself, but would be overjoyed should some sort of answer drift through the comments section.

In the meantime, single-stream recycling is still off-putting to me. Did you watch that video up there? We’ve outsourced our sorting to the machines? What happens when the machines stop serving us, and we start serving the machines? I’ll tell you what: Skynet.

Tags: can ladies, recycling, the environment

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 20th, 2010 at 12:25 am and is filed under Current Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.