The Top 40

Say what you want about recycling, every day on my way to work at ten to six I see an army of independent recycling contractors picking up every scrap of trash they can find.

Say what you want about recycling, every day on my way to work at ten to six I see an army of independent recycling contractors picking up every scrap of trash they can find.

I think Jeff, who is an extremely perceptive essayist, fanned the ball on this one.

In the seventies (?) A Nation of Sheep.

In the F'king 21st century, A Nation of Trash Pickers.

Since I moved into my town in the eighties, on Tuesday's the town rubbish trucks would pick up as many barrels as you wanted to put out. (no dead dogs) In the first years of the 21st Century that was modified to exclude Vacuum Tube TV's which had to be brought down to the DPW and placed into a special container.
This year a new Democrat Mayor suddenly mandated that all trash pickup would be limited to one town supplied trash container. This container was optimized for automated pickup by Robo-trucks (the driver never gets out and there is no outside person. The new container MUST be turned to the street in the right direction and at the right distance from the curb. If a pedestrian or the wind blows the container out of alignment your house is skipped. If you have more trash and need another container then the cost is $250 per container, per year. The cost was $0 for trash pickup for the first thirty years I lived here. This radical and sudden change was instituted by the Mayor without a vote, even by the town selectmen. And the new trash contractor is the Mayors largest political contributor. (I think his name is Tony Soprano) It would be my assessment that the cash value of the former liberal trash benefit is being directly transferred into political graft benefiting the new Mayor.
No one in this Blue State city seems to be the least interested in doing anything, not even complaining.

PS Now that the town doesn't pick up anything and as much as you want to get rid of (over-age CAN be brought over to the transfer station in the next town at 10 cents a pound). This formerly pristine town is rapidly becoming a mess. At the end of my long, long driveway the registered wetlands are becoming a pig's sty.

Donate for the homeless?
I do it every time I throw a beer can out the car window!
Small(ish) town in NH (no deposit on drink containers)MOST folks 'round here separate aluminum out and take it for bailing at the transfer station. It's bailed, sold for "weight", and offsets the budget. Corrugated cardboard as well. Newspaper bailer is next. Glass is a worthless liability. Burning trash, even in outdoor furnaces,(did I mention NH=freakin' cold?) is officially illegal.
The Town Transfer Station is also where MOST of the adult local political discussion (amongst residents) happens.

I used to live in Cape Coral, FL. Raccoon's were everywhere so most people put bungee cords on the lid. The city required the bungees to not be on the cans cause they may snap back and hurt the picker-uppers. My brother had a decorative fence around the trash cans on the side of his house and he would hang the bungee on the fence when he took the trash can to the curb. He came home one trash day and found a ticket on his door for leaving the bungee on the fence. That's a violation of a city ordinance.

Cape Coral made trash pickup mandatory in 1998 because some people would just dump their trash in vacant lots instead of paying for trash pickup. Now, trash pickup is mandatory and is paid for with the property tax.

If you don't mow your lawn the city mows it when it gets 8" tall and bills the homeowner $75.

Societies always eventually collapse because most people are animals that cannot be reasoned with.

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This whole recycling thing is a mug's game. Nothing more than a feel-good. It makes money for a few and makes work for the rest of us. The paper makers do not need old newspaper. The bottle makers do not need old glass. The landfills is where most of the crap collected in the blue boxes ends up. Oh, maybe the aluminum cans. Do the math on it. How many hours collecting and compacting and transporting and storing and then refining those cans? We burn more fuel and utilize more space and waste more manpower than the aluminum is worth. The Chinese take it away for free because they have so many cargo containers returning to China and they pile it up in huge dumps. Like, how much stuff in this world is made from aluminum?

Couple years ago I took a whole truckload of stuff to the local recycler and 95% of it was rejected. WTF? Couple weeks later I saw that that recycler was a gov't funded deal and was in the red pretty deep and the council was determining how much to give em.

Shortly after my neighbor told me about a non-gov't recycler that would take my stuff and give me some coin for it. Unfortunately I had already turned the stuff into the local refuse place.

Another neighbor told me the gov't funded place was photographing the license plates of the donar's and the contents of their recyclables.

Is there any evil this rotten assed gov't has not yet perpetrated?