residential recycling

No, not racy books. Actual, real trash.

Of late, it’s occurred to me that the recycling bin is a) a nuisance, occupying space in the garage where it blocks cabinetry I need to use; and b) rather a waste of time and effort. The painter has wanted it outside so he can stuff his used paper shielding strips in it, so it’s been parked in the front yard for the past week.

Meanwhile, a friend gave me about half-a-freezerful of high-end packaged goods: prepared meals from Omaha Steaks and Costco. The husband’s cardiologist informed them that they had to get completely off salt — that would be the same quack who gave me the same out-of-date and impractical advice a couple years ago. So they took that to heart and threw out or gave away literally months’ worth of food they’d stashed in in their freezer.

Understand, they’re both around 90 and so, sensibly enough, they tend to prefer packaged goods that can be heated in an oven or a microwave with minimal clean-up mess. These, as it develops, consist of a pile of salt with some food mixed in. So she donated a ton of food to her friends’ cause.

I fix a couple of these meals…and doing so, a small nightlight dawns:

The reason the blue recycling barrel seems like a ludicrous waste of time and effort to me is that about 90 percent of the stuff I slip into that thing (by way of avoiding having to make the mildly hazardous trip into the bum-infested alley) is NOT recyclable, per the City’s rules and regs. Why? Because I don’t eat that kind of food.

One of these ready-made meals — oversalted stewed mushroom beef over noodles — came in a box that was wrapped in stretchy plastic. Inside the box was a plastic container holding the food, and that was also covered in heat-seal plastic. So one meal — just ONE meal — came with THREE LAYERS of landfill-clogging packaging. By the time I’d sampled a couple of the things, I’d filled up the kitchen trash can!

Then some friends came over for a beading party. One of the women drinks, exclusively, diet soda, preferably diet Coke. I bought four bottles, since some of the other women will drink that gunk, too. So now I have two bottles of fake gunky drink to get rid of (donate? pour down the drain?) and four plastic bottles of the recyclable sort.

The fact is, I don’t eat that kind of thing, and I hate loathe and despise artificially flavored soda water. So…that means there’s a lot of wrappings, boxes, cans, and bottles that do not come into my house and so do not go out of my house.

When you buy real food, you do get some packaging waste:

• Meat comes on Styrofoam trays. Styrofoam is verboten in the recycling bins.
• It’s wrapped in heat-shrink plastic. Thin stretchy plastic is verboten in the recycling bins.
• Fresh fruits and vegetables come home in plastic grocery bags. Plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
• Pasta comes in clear plastic bags. Clear plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
• Rice comes in clear plastic bags. Clear plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
• Beans come in clear plastic bags. Clear plastic bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
• Dog food (to the extent that I feed commercial dog food, which ain’t much) comes in waxy paper bags. Dog food bags are verboten in the recycling bins.
• I do buy some ice cream, but it’s packaged in cool little plastic “cans” with screw-on lids — I keep those for use around the house and yard. It’s not like I eat that much ice cream, after all.
• Costco wants to give you a box (i.e., they want you to carry their trash away) every time you shop there, but I have two big Tupperware bins in the back of the clunk, so I reject the cardboard boxes.
• I shred old documents and waste paper from my printer…that stuff can go right into the compost bin.

When you come right down to it, just about the only thing that’s recyclable here is the junkmail. And I’m beginning to think I should put stickers on that stuff saying “return to sender” and hand it back to the mailman. Or take it and dump it in the blue mailboxes: I’ve about had it with having to carry an entire mailbox full of trash to the blue barrel six days a week. Otherwise, almost everything I throw out isn’t supposed to go into the blue bin at all.

The city laid off the trash cops, pretty much eliminating the chance of a fine, so I toss most of that stuff in there anyway. But why, when I have to take the wet garbage and the dog mounds out to the alley two or three times a week, anyway? Normally I’ll store the few things that can’t go into the composter in the refrigerator (to keep it from stinking) till I get around to unlocking gates and braving the bums. (Damn, but I miss my German shepherds…) Dog shit gets collected and stashed out of sight and smelling range until I take out the food waste.

If I have to go out to the alley anyway, and if in fact almost nothing of what goes into the blue barrel is supposed to go into the blue barrel, why do I have that giant blue thing taking up space in the garage? Why am I rolling it out to the curb every Thursday, willy nilly; then picking up the trash that gets dumped all over the yard, the sidewalk, and the street; picking up the busted barrel that the guy has tossed on its side in the road; and dragging it back in the garage to block the storage cabinets?

As it develops, picking up and sorting and delivering all that recyclable (and not-so-recyclable) trash costs taxpayers a lot of money: funding that is taken away from health care, schools, and other basic services. The effectiveness of these programs is not altogether a given. Here and there, people are actually questioning their usefulness., whether they’re worth the cost, whether popularizing curbside pick-up is a wise idea, and whether it would be more sensible, cost-effective, and kinder to the environment to legislate against all the wasteful packaging that produces all that unnecessary trash in the first place.

So with Painter Dude monopolizing the blue barrel this week, I’ve been testing the idea that except for the junk mail, all of the trash can go out to the alley. And y’know: it’s working. There’s not much extra stuff to haul out there, and what there is, is almost all non-recyclable.

After the trash guys pick up the last of the painter’s paper stuff, I am rolling that barrel out to the Bum Cage in the alley, where it can reside out of sight and mind. The few recyclables I have — maybe one wine bottle every couple weeks, a few beer cans a week, and a Maker’s Mark bottle about once every three or four months — can go into a neighbor’s bin on pickup morning.

As for the junk mail: “Return to Sender!”

The City of Phoenix encourages its residents to recycle by distributing rolling “blue barrels”: one-household garbage bins made of blue plastic into which we are supposed to deposit our alleged recyclables, to be rolled out to the street in front where they’re picked up on Thursday mornings.

In the older sections of town — the tracts that have alleys (i.e., about 20 feet of blessedly empty space between you and the neighbor behind you), they park large four-household bins for actual garbage, to be picked up (also on Thursdays) and trucked to the county landfill.

Both of these are nuisances.

• Dragging your trash out to the front curb: a messy bother that invariably results in trash dumped in the street.

• Sharing garbage collection with neighbors who dump stuff on the ground and let it lie: for the birds.

• Sharing garbage collection with neighbors who drop dog sh!t in the bin and leave the lid open for the breeding convenience of the local mosquito and fly populations: for the birds. (Literally: birds love flies and mosquitoes: gooood to eat!)

• Sharing garbage collection with neighbors who jam the bin chuckablock full so you can’t fit in your little Safeway bag full of nonrecyclables (or anything else!): for the birds.

All of these glories may be about to come to an end.

Ever since the upwardly mobile (read: money, political clout) young mother walked out into her backyard to find one of the local bums had jumped her back wall and was happily molesting her two little girls, the new (much treasured!) upwardly mobile neighbors have been up in arms. Among other things, they’ve demanded that the city close off the alleys!

Among the several things this will entail is the end of garbage collection in the alleys. The city had already proposed this (for different reasons: its subcontractor resents having to drive its huge 21st-century garbage trucks down throughways built for 1960s equipment) and been roundly rejected.

But now, lo! We have new neighbors, new bums, and a change of heart.

If they close the alleys, they’ll end up issuing new, one-house garbage bins to all the residents. These are the same size as the blue barrels, only colored mud green. As with the blue barrels, we’ll have to roll them out to the curb for the garbage collectors to dump into their trucks (and, incidentally, all over the street and our yards).

Now, for the micro-news:

This is fine by me, except that I keep the recycling barrel in the garage and don’t have room for two of such barrels. And I’m sorry, but I’m NOT going to store one of those ugly things on my expensively landscaped and maintained xeriscaped front yard!

So I’ve been thinking about this, and… Last time I talked to the City about the trash pickup — to complain about their dumping trash all over the front yard, sidewalk, and street — I said “and there’s all these food wrappers on the ground.” This elicited a knee-jerk lecture from the woman on the other end of the line, who insisted, THREE TIMES, that “you’re not supposed to put food wrappers in the recycling.” Every time I would reply, “But they’re NOT my food wrappers!” she would re-run her lecture from the beginning.

This is the caliber of people hired to run the city’s recycling program. 😀

But…the truth is, some of the stuff that goes into my blue barrel is food wrappers. And…as a practical matter, prob’ly about 70% to 80% of the stuff I dump in there is not really what the City defines as “recyclable.” That barrel is convenient because it’s in the garage, and so I often will toss stuff there that ought to be recyclable and that in many other municipalities is recyclable but that is not recyclable in lovely uptown Phoenix.

Here’s the thing: I prepare almost all my food from scratch. That means I buy things in bulk; I buy vegetables and fruits that don’t come in packages; I buy meat and fish and chicken that don’t come in packaging that our honored Subcontractor defines as “recyclable.”

BUT because I buy a lot of stuff from Costco, many things I buy come in cellophane wrappers and consumer-proof plastic clamshells that very probably are not “recyclable.”

It’s a rare day that I buy a consumer product that comes in a truly “recyclable” package.

A-n-d…by way of not having to put on my clothes and track down a pair of shoes and unlock a padlocked gate and take my life in my hands to go out to the alley (you don’t go out there after dark, not on a bet), I just drop all the junk in the blue barrel.

So I’m thinking, if and when they put the alley-closure scheme into action, I’m going to stash the blue barrel in what will then be my piece of property behind the house and keep the new brown barrel in the garage. Everything can then be dumped into the brown barrel, and I will never have to go into the alley again.

😉

Underscoring my point that very little of what I consume comes in recyclable packaging:

Couple of days ago, I decided I would try a packaged meal. Normally I don’t eat the things, because they taste terrible and they’re decidedly not worth their price. But this was a fancy gourmet packaged meal from the fancy gourmet market: a scampi concoction with enough garlic to cover many a factory-made culinary sin.

This noon, not in the mood for cooking, I opened it to make the day’s Big Meal.

The packaging defies belief:

• a plastic package of sauce. (Defrost this in a bowl under running hot water. How…ecologically wonderful… /s)
• a plastic package of cooked noodles. (Defrost in a colander under cold running water. Uhmmmm…)
• a plastic package of frozen spinach and red bell pepper slices
• a plastic package of small, raw shrimp

The plan: Defrost the sauce by wasting a large amount of heated water. Defrost the noodles by wasting a large amount of cold water. Dump these along with the vegetables and shrimp into a pan and…well…heat. Et voilà! Dinner! Or something.

The quality of this fine meal was OK. Just OK. The amount of waste it generated boggles the brain: four plastic packages plus a larger plastic bag to hold the set of smaller plastic bags. Not to mention the amount of water wasted down the drain.

Now…  We’re told that we’re not allowed to recycle “food wrappers.” So…presumably none of this stuff was recyclable! In theory, none of it should’ve gone into the blue barrel. But in practice, all of it did.

Consider: if I had made this stuff as Real Food, rather than defrosting it out of a package, here’s the wrapping we would have had:

• tomatoes: none (I would’ve made a tomato sauce with fresh tomatoes, fresh garlic, olive oil, and herbs from the garden)
• olive oil: some day, about two months from now, 1 plastic or glass olive oil jar
• fettucini: 1 small cardboard box, holding enough pasta for not one but four meals
• shrimp: none if bought fresh; 1 Costco plastic bag if bought frozen in enough quantity to make not one but a half-dozen meals
• spinach: none
• red bell pepper: none
• bag to carry the stuff home: none if purchased at Costco; two if purchased at a regular grocery purveyor…bags that would be used to collect dog mounds off the neighbors’ yards

Hence, my theory that in reality I dispose of little actually recyclable waste. So minimal, as a matter of fact, that on trash pickup day I could simply walk across the street and drop the few recyclables I might have into the neighbor’s blue barrel.

Maybe, though…maybe that’s un-American. How much recyclable waste, really, does your household generate?