Trashing My Plan

Back in the late 90s, neither myself nor any of my siblings drove what you would consider to be high-end vehicles (a trend which continues today, I might add). Because these cars were all on or near their last legs, you never wanted to put too much money in to keep them running. So, sometimes when we needed an expensive part to keep a car on the road my father and I would head off to the local junkyard to see if we could salvage one from another dead car. I always liked trips to the junkyard. First off, 90% of the movies I was watching at the time featured a gunfight in a junkyard, so I thought action was around every turn (it wasn't). And even if there wasn't a movie being shot, at least I would learn about engines (I didn't). Anyway, one time we were looking for a headlight for my sister's Volvo and were about to take it out of one of the cars on the lot when the guy who ran the place came over and began to yell at us. You see, we had wandered into the place where the high-end wrecks were and even though there was nothing in place to tell us otherwise, we should have just known not to go over there. Apparently, these were the "good" junk cars. Not particularly appreciating getting talked down to by a guy who looked as though he invented the process of creating crystal meth, I never went back there ever again. (Snobby behavior? Yep. And I'm not apologizing for it.) Still, I learned a very valuable lesson that day - not all trash is created equally.

Now, I have had issues with trash collection ever since my town switched over to the generic green barrels you see everywhere. It has nothing to do with the company and everything to do with the fact that I used to be able to throw away whatever I needed to and now I can't. Like everyone else on the planet, I'm simply not a fan of getting things taken away from me when I feel as though they are working just fine. For the most part I manage, but occasionally the need to throw away more than the Stepford barrels allows rears its ugly head. A few days ago some new chairs arrived at my house. As often happens these days, the boxes they arrived in were about 50% packing materials. The last time this happened I ended up simply stacking the styrofoam on top of the barrel and came out the next day to discover the material still here and a note on my barrel telling me the company won't take recycling when the lid on the barrel can't be closed. Having learned from that time I made sure to break all the pieces up so they were so small I could shove them far enough into the barrel to secure the lid. What I couldn't fit into the recycling barrel I put into the regular trash. I felt guilty about not recycling all the packing material, but thought it was better than the alternative.

So, you can imagine my surprise when I went out to collect my barrels the next day and found yet another florescent green note attached to the lid. On the paper were several options of the things I could have done wrong, but underlined was the option: styrofoam in the container. First of all, since when is styrofoam not recyclable? When I order Chinese food (cause I'm such a health nut), that comes in styrofoam packages which have the recyclable logo on, so I assumed it was all the same. Is it not? Here I felt bad about not recycling all of it and and it turns out I wasn't supposed to be recycling any of it. Then I got annoyed because I assumed this sticker meant they hadn't taken my recycling and I would have to wait until the next recycling period, which on my street won't be for another two weeks. This meant I would have been holding on to some of this trash for a month, which is not exactly going to inspire me to make sure everything which can be recycled gets recycled. I've said it a million times: when you want people to put in the extra effort on something the best way to make sure it happens is to not also make it hard for them. Fortunately when I opened the lid to confirm my suspicions I was met with an empty container.

I was once told there is a camera on the arm which picks up the barrels, so my best guess is that the truck driver emptied the contents and then discovered I had violated the rules. The fact that he didn't check before adding it to the rest of his haul shows that this is apparently one of those rules which they would like if I followed, but not so much that the guy is willing to actually get out of the truck to make sure I'm not attempting to recycle something I shouldn't and he certainly isn't about to go in after it once he sees illegal trash among the rest of my approved trash. Now I am just waiting to see if I get anything else in the mail or if next time around my house is on some kind of watch list to make sure we aren't breaking any more rules. Either way, the fact that there is good trash versus bad trash is just another one of those things I feel like isn't an issue in a lot of places. As near as I can tell it is just my street and the nearest junkyard. Unfortunately, unlike the junkyard, it is not like I can decide to take my business somewhere else in the future. Pardon the pun, but they kind of have me over a barrel here.