Thursday, March 03, 2005

Recycling: The Real Nitty Gritty

Is recycling really as easy as proponents make it sound? While you read the following, imagine that you have arthritis in your hands, or a vision problem.

Let’s look at the real nitty-gritty of recycling. It sounds easy. Just put your glass in one bin, newsprint in another, metal in a third, and plastics in a fourth, instead of putting it in the trash. But it’s not that easy.

This was the procedure when I recycled in Englewood:

First, if the item was a container, it had to be rinsed out. This was so any leftover food wouldn’t draw pests and leftover chemicals wouldn’t hurt anyone handling the bottle. Let’s face it, you don’t want the trash man or a passing child stung by the wasps trying to get at the pop bottles.

Labels had to be removed. I never got it straight if the entire label had to come off, or whether it was okay if a little paper and adhesive were left. At any rate, most labels have to be soaked off with water (a scarce resource) and the foiled labels never really come off. Other labels are applied with a lot of very strong, messy adhesive. My arthritic mother will never be able to get those off.

If you’re recycling newspapers, you have to separate the “slick” paper from the newsprint. Most of us do this while we’re reading the paper, but if you don’t have a chance for a day or two, you’re going to have to take time to do it anyway. And you can’t put old phone books or paperbacks in the bin, even though they’re printed on foolscap, too, because the adhesives in the spines will gum up the works.

For bottles, you have to remove the caps. Obviously, metal and plastic caps can’t go in with the glass bottles and plastic caps have to come off the plastic bottles because they probably aren’t the same kind of plastic. I never understood whether you were also supposed to try to remove the anti-tampering ring that’s left on a lot of bottle necks, but I can tell you that trying to remove them involves sharp instruments and a high risk of incurring deep puncture wounds requiring tetanus shots.

Then, you have to keep track of what’s recyclable and what’s not. I noticed on Pueblo’s City-County Health Department website that green glass is not on the list. Only colorless and brown. (If you’re really interested in recycling, only drink brands of beer in clear or brown bottles, not green. Heineken is out.) You can’t recycle tempered glass, like chipped Fire King pie plates, nor can you recycle the glass from light bulbs, even if you break out the metal parts. And you can’t recycle plastic that isn’t a number one or a number two, even if it does have a little triangular recycling symbol on it. Trying to read the numbers on clear containers isn’t always easy. Even if there was a “1” or a “2” they sometimes didn’t take them for some obscure reason. And, while aluminum cans are very recyclable, old aluminum window frames present problems.

Next, the stuff had to go into the correct bin, which you also had to find space for. Newsprint in the yellow bin, bottles in the green bin and metal in the red bin. They weren’t labelled, so you had to write it down or remember it. Actually, I don’t think it mattered, since whoever picked the stuff up could easily see what was in the different bins, but those were the instructions.

Finally, and this was one of the most difficult things, you had to keep track of whether or not this was recycling week, since they only picked up recyclables every other week. Englewood had an ordinance that said you couldn’t put any sort of trash out more than 12 hours before pickup. Therefore, you couldn’t just leave the bins out every week or all the time. If you missed a week, you had four weeks worth of stuff before it got picked up again. Once I ended up with six weeks’ worth, which was a lot considering the Denver papers are a lot bigger than the Chieftain.

In short, you want me to spend time and resources (including water and temporary storage space) getting these items ready for recycling and you expect me to pay a fee on top of it? Get real.

The 2010 Commission is sponsoring a Public Forum on Recycling at the Rawlings Library this Saturday from 10 am to noon.