What Goes Around

I am green. At least I try to be. I wash my garbage, separate it by material type and give it to the city in a blue bin every Monday. Plastic, glass, aluminum, paper. I rinse out my whiskey and wine bottles, my beer and soda bottles and cans, my jars of jelly, salsa and mayo. I scrub flip top plastic containers that once held a salad or a dozen wings and I re-use them to hold other things. More salad, more wings. I pick the cheese off pizza boxes and dust off the crumbs. I've considered blow-drying the grease stains. I can tell I'm old because I used to just throw everything in one garbage can. Now I have the blue bin, a paper handled bag, a plastic grocery bag of plastic grocery bags and the garbage can. Whenever I consume something, disposing of it's wrapper gives me pause. If it's paper I wonder what kind of paper. If it's plastic I search it carefully for a recycling symbol. If it's aluminum, I rinse it out or ball it up. I check for a return fee and then throw it in the blue bin anyway, recalling the old guy in the mini van who raids our stash every week for returnables. I don't know if he knows we know, but I don't want to cut him off if it's putting gas in the van. And then I think, if it's putting gas in the van and you can smell that van coming five minutes before it arrives and long after it moves on, now my goodwill is messing up the atmosphere. I probably have black lung because I'm recycling. But I don't want to be rude. He's gotta make a living, too. And I really don't want to take the returnables to Stop and Shop myself. The last two trips were a disaster - damn those can cruncher machines that always break down or fill up on my third can when I have 103 more to push in. Have you met the guy who "maintains" these machines? When you do, tell him I'm still waiting. I also confess to leaving brands the store doesn't take in the rejected can return. It only holds so many and all of them are mine. I apologize for any inconvenience, which is what the digital display says to me whenever the machine breaks down. I mean well, but I just don't have that kind of time. Recycling at home and supporting a stranger works out better for me. It's all the rage to be green now, and it pains me to think of how willy nilly I once was with garbage. I imagine how much waste one person can be responsible for and I remember seeing a report in the news on it. Some guy decided to carry his garbage around with him for a week - whatever he generated he had to hold onto in a bag. What would be in my bag? Well, this week: giant empty plastic tray with lid from chick-fi-la which once held nuggets for 25 people, four wine bottles, a fifth of Dewers, a fifth of Tangaray, a fifth of Jack, a mini-keg of Heffeweizen, several beer bottles, several soda bottles, several soda cans, several crumpled up cocktail napkins, shrimp skins and tails, gift wrap, tissue paper, junk mail, cake box, frosting cans, an entire roll of used paper towels, a broken hanger, two pairs of holy socks, scooped cat litter and whatever I swept off the kitchen floor just before the party. I'm sure I'm leaving a lot out, but now that I recycle, I feel better about a lot of that crap at least coming back my way some day. I honestly don't know how it works and sometimes believe that stuff in the blue bin is secreted off in special trucks but driven to the same dump in the end. I don't know what goes into making a bottle that holds alcohol, or how many of them get recycled to make more bottles of alcohol, but I think something can be learned from the plastic water jug people. You buy a jug, and then you just refill it until it gets smooshy or gross. Then you buy another jug. And you recycle the old jug. If I had one big bottle of Jack, polished it off, then went down to the liquor store and just refilled it, think how many times I could do that before that bottle had to be recycled. Think of the space, the energy, the time, the resources, the money I would be saving everyone if they did not have to keep making so many individual bottles of Jack in a variety of sizes - nips, half pints, pints, 5ths, gallons, and "is this size legal?" Even beer bottles and cans, for that matter. Let's all just go down to the store and get refills. Think of the friends you'd make! The world would be a much happier place, you wouldn't have to wash your garbage and we could get rid of those damn can crunchers once and for all. I'm pretty sure we wouldn't be putting anyone out of a job by eliminating those.