Recycling (and fails)

It's a sad day in the world of Julie. Sigh.

I just spent a good hour attempting to recycle the items that have taken over our garage. It happens every so often—I wait too long and suddenly a trip through our garage is like navigating an obstacle course, with broken-down cardboard boxes threatening to tumble over in one direction and boxes full of brown glass bottles and tubs of soda cans blocking your way the next.

So I got down to business, sorting and organizing all that recycling before loading it into my car and heading to the great new recycling center I wrote about last month. The only problem? It was closed.

"Darn," I said to myself. Then, in an attempt at optimism I said, "Well, self, maybe they just shortened their hours until spring." But deep down, I knew better.

So instead I drove down to the big recycling bins across from the park. I was out of luck with all the glass crowding my trunk (it's not accepted there), but at least I could recycle the cans and plastic containers and paper there. Only I hit another snag in the game plan: the giant bin for cans and plastic was full. No, more than full. It was overflowing. People had even left bags of items that didn't fit sitting on the walkway next to the bin (not good stewardship, in my opinion—who says hey, the recycling is full, I'll just throw my waste down on the ground for someone else to deal with—but that's another rant for another day).

So I dumped the tub of paper items I had with me in the paper bin (one little tub! out of a whole car's worth of recycling!) and headed home, determined to find out when the Good Sam recycling place was open to go back.

And then my greatest fears were confirmed. According to their website, due to financial difficulty (hmm—bet you haven't heard that phrase at all lately), the recycling center closed on 12/31/2008. Sigh again.

So now I have a car full of recycling and nowhere to take it.

This makes me very sad, for a number of reasons. For one thing, Conservative Boy (yes, him!) and I have gotten very good at recycling. Most weeks we only have one bag of garbage (that's not even all the way full) to take out to the curb. But what good does it do when there's nowhere to take it?

I know what some of you are going to say right now. Stop recycling. It's not worth it anyway. It wastes more energy than it saves. But you know what? I don't buy it. Yes, recycling does require energy—the energy to transport the goods to where they are recycled, to sort them, to break them down and manufacture them into whatever comes next. But the energy used to manufacture new products from raw materials is at least ten times more than the energy consumed by collecting and recycling—and by transporting the recycled goods to retailers too. (I did not pull this fact out of the air, by the way—it's from a 2004 study from the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment. This is the sort of thing I like to read for fun.)

And, even if we aren't going to run out of room for landfills anytime soon, as lovely Umbra points out:

"... landfills themselves are no innocent wildflowers dotting the landscape. Piles of trash lying smushed together are fairly disgusting, seeping dubious goo and farting to beat an 8-year-old on a school bus. The leachate of our trash melange contains dangerous toxins. Diverting garbage of all sorts becomes increasingly urgent as electronics consumption (and thus disposal) rises. Recycling innocent tuna cans forms a habit that may eventually pave the way for recycling cell phones and car batteries."

I had to quote her. She says it so eloquently!

But still, Umbra's wisdom does not solve my problem. My car is full of recycling and I have nowhere to take it.

Photo: Rosa Say from Flickr

A New Place to Recycle

If you live in L-Town, get thee to the new recycling center with all your recyclable items.

I went on Wednesday (with one heck of a load of recycling, much to C.B.'s glee) and was impressed with the recycling center, which is sponsored by Good Sam Ministries and located at 1200 N. Postville Drive.

You might already place your cardboard, milk jugs, and cans in the brown bins the city picks up curbside every other week. And maybe you take your recyclables to the big green containers near downtown, where you can dump cardboard and paper, plastic, and aluminum and tin cans. But there's still reason to head to the new recycling center: they take all sorts of treasures, including colored and clear glass, tin, aluminum, chip board, paper, books, corrugated cardboard, ink and toner cartridges, batteries, call phones, and all kinds of plastics except 6PS. Now that's quite a list.

Best of all, even though I understand the recycling center is still a work in progress, it was pretty darn clean and organized as far as these things go. While Christmas music played on the radio, I bopped around dropping my recyclables into the clearly labeled containers that line the walls. Piece of cake. And very worth the trouble.

See, now there's no reason not to recycle if you live in L-Town. My goal is to get to the recycling center often enough that C.B. won't get quite so exasperated with my stockpile of recyclables in the garage. We'll see how that works out.

Oh, and, all you business owners in town, if you have large quantities of recycled goods the folks at Good Sam Ministries will even pick them up. Hurrah!