Adventures in Recycling

Too much work, too much travel, too much to do when I am home - so I haven't written much. Our new president has not been able to immediately solve our nation's problems and the economy is still in the toilet. But the concert on the Mall just before the inauguration was pretty cool. I kept wondering how, with the big crowd, no one fell into the reflecting pool. Maybe someone did and they just didn't show it on HBO.

I've talked to a couple of friends who were at the inauguration, in the big big crowd on the Mall. One, who spent 12 hours in the cold, said she wouldn't have missed it and she would never do it again. No arrests, but lots of hypothermia, I understand. Now the AP wants a cut of the iconic "Hope" poster by Shepard Fairey, saying it was based on their photo. Fairey has a solo exhibit at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art and got arrested Friday night on the way to his opening party; two arrest warrants had been issued in January for creating art without a license, or at least without permission.

But back to Atlanta. With the recent budget problems, the city has cut curbside recycling to every other week. The first two weeks after this change, they didn't pick up our recycling at all. Tom called Anne Fauver's office to find out what was going on. He was told that the schedule had been changed and we now had every-other-week pick up. He said he knew that, but with every-other-week pick up, they should still have picked it up on one of the two weeks. The person he was talking to paused and said that was right. It did get picked up the next day.

Since then, it seems to have gotten sorted out, but every-other-week pick up is not frequent enough if you are really trying to recycle. I guess we got serious about this in the spring and summer, and now even in a week have way more recyclable stuff than fits into our city-issued black recycling bin. We have used plastic crates, but they usually end up disappearing, so more recently have just been putting bottles, cans, and other containers into plastic trash bags.

So I just was checking the city's recycling information on line and see that containers for recycling have to be labelled as such and that on request the city provides stickers for this purpose. They also have a 95 gallon rolling recycling cart that can be purchased for $70. The cart looks just like the Herbie Curbies that we all have (although ours is pretty decrepit, having come with the house when I bought it in 1989, and having lost its lid in recent years, to the delight of neighborhood raccoons - but I digress) but is blue. So we will probably get one. I wonder if it is made of recycled plastic? Here's the ordering instructions, for both that and the stickers.

Of course with the economy in the toilet, demand for recyclables is way down. The Times had a story on this in December, and more recently it has been in the AJC. It would be better of course if we just produced less trash. I do use those cloth bags in the trunk of my car pretty consistently at the grocery store, and sometimes remember to take them to other stores. I remember when I was in Munich last year, being impressed at how much less packaging there was for some of the items in the stores. Walking around one evening, I saw someone emerge from a store with the trash can at the end of the day - it was about the size of the trash can we have in our downstairs bathroom.

If we really want recycling, maybe the city should give us the big container for recycling and the small container for our trash. But in the long run, wouldn't it be best if they could both be small?