I’m proud to be a recycling dude. In fact, my whole family has embraced recycling as one of our civic duties. We save our cardboard, our plastic milk jugs, the plastic grocery bags, and of course the returnable bottles and cans.
But why does recycling have to be so messy?
Take my cardboard for example. In fact, like Rodney Dangerfield might have said, take my cardboard, please. That stuff stacks up until you have a mound of slightly dampish brown paper piled haphazardly in your garage or mudroom. Sometimes the pile in our house has become so high that my sons refer to it as Mt. Corrugated.
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And then there are the plastic bottles, No. 2 only, please. What is the deal with exclusively recycling plastic that has the number 2 with a triangle surrounding the numeral? Maybe it has something to do with the smell of sour milk, because that seems to be the only bottle that consistently makes it into that particular bin.
The grocery bags are the most annoying. It’s amazing to me how long one of those flimsy bags will last once the wind has picked it up and blown it into the branches of a tree. A bag in a tree, clinging like some gigantic bat with a bad case of leprosy, will stay up there for years. Being practical, we’ve one of those tube-thingies that you stuff a plastic grocery bag in at the top, and it will conveniently dispense a bag out of the bottom of the tube whenever you need one. The problem is we never need an old grocery bag, and the supposedly nifty tube fills up in about a week. So now, hanging beside the convenient bag dispensing tube thing, we have three plastic grocery bags, and each of those grocery bags is stuffed like a bloated tick with even more bags.
But I hold a special place of contempt in my heart for returnable bottles. It’s not the pile of bottles growing in the utility room over the last couple of months that bothers me, or the growing sense of a fly-infested sticky nightmare of corn syrup and brown dye collecting at the bottom of the bin, or even my wife’s need to seperate the dark bottles from the clear bottles. I can even tolerate her look of annoyance if I peel a label off of the bottle, the absent-minded distraction costing us an entire nickel, while watching an episode of Family Guy.
The thing that bothers me is the flotsam and jetsam of moral depravity the bottles represent when we dump them into the sorting trough at the redemption center. There it is for all to see, the evidence of parents condoning childhood obesity by allowing their kids to drink too many sodas, the cans and bottles that once held alcoholic beverages that just scream about Saturday nights that we should really leave unmentioned, and then there are the empty cans of diet sodas weeping saccharine tears at our futile attempt to live a healthier lifestyle.
I suppose recycling is a necessary part of living on a crowded Earth straining to support seven billion people all trying to send Twitter messages on their smartphones, but I sure wish there was a better way to shovel the piles of stuff out of my house and into their appropriately colored bins.
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