Sunday, August 2, 2009

Phone Books and general recycling issues

Oh great look what landed on my doorstop and on the doorstop of all my neighbors!
Not only is it a phone book, it's two phone books in a plastic bag! Ugh there is nothing redeemable about this at all. I have even signed up at YellowPageGoesGreen.org to take myself off the distribution list but of course they still deliver them because they could care less. Especially since I live in an apartment complex, the person that gets paid to deliver them isn't going to try and figure out which apartment may or may not want them. The problem starts way before that though the company isn't going to take the time to make a list in the first place or even bother to listen to an organization that wants to stop unsolicited books. They are just going to keep giving them.

If everyone who doesn't actually want the phone book was to come home and find them and then promptly put them in the recycle bin the bins would be overflowing by days end just with phone books. There are three large bins curbside next to the dumpster and they are always over flowing. We have our own boxes on our patio to put our stuff in because you never know when you are going to be able to actually get stuff in the curbside bins. Most people take their recycles out and if the bins are full they just trash the stuff. The bins are usually pretty much all recyclable stuff but every once in a while you will find bags of trash in the recycle bins. I guess some people are just too lazy to try and figure out what goes where.

It is not so bad here, the first apartment I lived in was horrible. The dumpster and recycle bins were right next to each other and the dumpster was wide open, no lid on it, you could just toss your bag into the open dumpster. For some reason people would still put their trash bags in the COVERED recycle bins. I don't understand that at all, you can just toss your trash in the open dumpster or take the time to open the lid of a dirty recycle bin and put trash in it, how does that make any sense. I am so baffled by the things people do.

Here there isn't that much trash in the recycle bin all that often but the items that people put in the recycle bins are quite often not recyclable. Like a kids plastic toy ride on bike, yes it is plastic but not recyclable plastic, hey at least they are trying. What bugs me the most is what the employees of the complex put in there and do with the recycle bins. When the bins are overflowing and the lids don't close all the way quite often a maintenance guy will go over take out stuff until it does close and put that stuff in the trash. He won't even see if one of the other bins has room or pick out the stuff that isn't actually recyclable first he just takes it all right over to the dumpster. When a kitchen light blows, the long fluorescent tube lights, the maintenance guys put them in the recycle bin. That makes even less sense than the plastic kids bike. I get so angry at what I see in the recycle bins that I have stopped taking our stuff out and make my husband do it and tell him not to tell me what he saw. That doesn't keep me blissfully unaware because the dumpster and recycle bins are right below our apartment so if I look out our bedroom window I can see them and our parking spot is right in front of that area so every time I get into my car and I back out I see the bins spewing with non recyclables.

We have single stream recycling so all items go in the same bins. A few years ago it use to be one bin for plastic and aluminum, one for paper, and one for glass. When they switched to single stream single households got new large blue cans the same size as the large grey trash cans, previously they had three small different colored boxes one for each type. Apartments and condos at the time had three large different colored bins one for each type of recyclable. They didn't replace those with blue bins for apartments and condos until the ones they had needed replacing due to wear and tear. The trash area we use has two blue bins and one red, red was for glass. People don't understand that and still put everything in the blue, including glass, but very few put anything, even glass, in the red so there are basically only two bins being used regularly. I understand the confusion but it really shouldn't be that hard to figure out and why do they pay attention to only glass in that one but continue to fill the others with non recyclables and even straight trash sometimes.

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