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The Circle of Recycled Life

1. Somewhere in this great land,a concerned and responsible corporation is having their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplement printed on 100% recycled paper.

2. As soon as they are completed millions of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are shipped by truck to the various regional receiving centers of the U. S. Post Office.

3. From those centers, any number of allocated pallets of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements are broken out, put on U.S. post office trucks and delivered to local postal carrier destinations inside northern California.

4. My personal Paradise postal carrier and hundreds of others report for work at local postal carrier centers throughout northern California and load up their vans with enough of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements to deliver one or more to each and every house on their route.

5. My very polite personal Paradise postal carrier parks her van at the end of my block and loads her sack with these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

6. She comes up my walk, up the porch stairs, and deposits my full share of these colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my mailbox with a clang every day between one and three in the afternoon.

7. Hearing the clang I sigh and wend my weary way to the front door and open my mailbox and pluck out said colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements.

8. With a heavier sigh I go back in, trudge through my house, out my back door to the alley, and place the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements into my Recycling bin with the rest of the week’s mound.

9. Tomorrow the huge, lumbering Paradise Waste Management Recycling garbage truck will stop and empty my Recycling bin into its maw and haul all the colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements off to the Chico California Recycling and Brand New Mountain of Garbage center.

10. The collected colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements will then be shipped, by truck, to the center for turning recyclable paper into….. recycled paper which will then be used by a concerned and responsible corporation for their twice-weekly colorful and compelling advertising supplements printed on 100% recycled paper.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat. Next year, as sure as spring brings septic system failures to Paradise, postage will increase because the U.S. Postal Colorful and compelling 100% recyclable advertising supplements“Service” will need more money to keep The Recycled Circle of life going.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • ghostsniper June 1, 2018, 7:58 PM

    Ours show up on Thurs afternoon, yeah, between 1 and 3.
    I drag em outta the box, stand there and sort the good from the bad and ugly, then trudge back to my office and veer to the left where I have 2 55 gal rusty assed burn barrels and all the bad and ugly get dropped in there, then I slide the wooden lid back over it and continue to my office. Every month or 3 I throw a dash of gas in those barrels and wooosh! fuk recycling

  • Bill in Tennessee June 2, 2018, 6:03 AM

    I’m with ghostsniper on this one; local ordinances don’t require recycling (yet) and I’ll be damned if I ever do. Maybe one day… if they decide to PAY me to do it, I might be induced to start yet another trash bin, but nah, they just go in the dumpster, and thence to a landfill or whatever the locals do with trash. I’ve never been sufficiently motivated to find out. The libs I used to work with in academe may fret over such stuff, but I now have better things to occupy my time, like enjoying retirement.

    But I have given a brief thought from time to time about this ‘circle of recycled life’ concept. I often suspect it is maintained solely to keep the Post Office afloat, and to keep our “polite postal delivery’ folks from… well, from going postal on a national scale.

    Hmmmm, maybe out postal carriers serve some clandestine function we don’t know about and delivering mail is their cover! Who else (besides Google Streets) roams nearly all of our highways and streets every single day? New conspiracy theory: The Post Office is spying on us all, pass it on!

    Hehehehehe….

  • BillH June 2, 2018, 7:25 AM

    BillinTN: I thought Amazon was keeping the Post Office afloat.

  • Glenda T. Goode June 2, 2018, 8:02 AM

    Recycling is not as ‘efficient’ as it is purported to be. Depending on the commodity, a lot of supposedly recycled materials end up in the landfill anyways. You cannot over-saturate a marketplace with a product for which there is no demand. In other words, there are not enough uses for the recycled materials to actually recycle them. What cannot be sold or even given to businesses that actually reuse the stuff is disposed of. Oh My!! My Shock!!!! The Horror!!!!!

    While the idea of recycling is a valid one, the mistake has been to mandate the process before any market place for the materials to be recycled has been developed. Before mandated recycling in the area where I used to live was put in place there was a volunteer community recycling program that had arisen due to a demand for some of the materials that were being recycled. The program paid for itself and cost the community NOTHING.

    With the onset of mandatory recycling 7 $1.5 million dollar transfer stations were built in the country. Garbage now had to have stickers on each bag costing $2 each. You were required to separate recyclables into separate containers. The companies who were picking up the refuse had to comply with the law by penalty of criminal litigation if they failed to.

    The end result was that thousands of tons of materials carefully separated and washed or processed by the consumer before placing them in the appropriate bin were land-filled along with everything else. Ironic isn’t it??????

    No recycling program is worth following without a respective need for the material recycled and the left has decided to put the cart before the horse by demanding recycling even though it does not make economic sense and has not reduced the flow into the landfills much at all.

    The left has used an emotional plea for Mother Earth (Gaia) to force citizens to pay millions for transfer stations, municipal trucks and for more expensive land fill requirements all so they can feel better about their own lives. Forget the misery that they have caused both financially and by labor that they have forced all citizens to do.

  • Sam L. June 2, 2018, 8:52 AM

    Recycle without end, Amen

  • ghostsniper June 2, 2018, 10:46 AM

    As far as I’m concerned the whole recycling this is bass ackwards.
    The recycling should start at the place of purchase.
    I just bought a new Logitech mouse and the packaging that got throwed away was far bigger than the mouse itself.
    Is all that necessary?
    I didn’t want that other stuff, I just wanted the mouse.
    Then throw in the amazon box and bags of texas air and do a little math and then I know why that mouse cost $50 (even with free 2 day shipping) when it should have cost a lot less.

    But wait a minute. The total cost isn’t over with.
    I’m not supposed to burn plastic (packaging) so that means I’m supposed to throw it away in a proper method and that costs money too. Then, the people I throw it away to have to pay money to whomever they give it to.

    Does this mouse ever stop costing money?

    FWIW, my old mouse went in a box out in the workshop that has about 15 other mouses in it. They too have fallen to the dreaded AutoCAD left click suicide. I’m lucky to get 2 years out of one, but usually less than 6 months. One of these days I’ll empty that box in the landfill and bring it back here and start filling it up all over again. How much better all the way around if Logitech simply put that mouse without all the fanfare in a simple little bubblewrap envelope and sent it to me, and did so for about $20 rather than $50. But then, as BillH explained, the post office would have to raise the price of stamps again…….sigh….

  • Gordon June 2, 2018, 5:39 PM

    A lot of packaging is there to try to keep thieving bastards at bay. Your mouse is packaged for retail sale at Best Buy, even though probably more of Logitech’s sales come from Amazon now.

    Minneapolis doesn’t yet have 7 bins, but one can have three if one wants a composting bin. The recycling program, as with the garbage program itself, is a nice little corrupt system that is never quite put out to bid. Specific companies have specific parts of town, and specific companies get paid to sort the recyclables. Those that can’t be sold on, or sold at a loss even, go to Minneapolis’ garbage burner, which is next to Target Field. Heat from the burning is purchased by some downtown buildings, in the cooler months. So Minneapolis’ good liberals do what Ghostsniper does.

    But one cannot tell folks this is all a big scam and boondoggle. If you eliminated it all, they would beg for it back. There are many folks out there for whom recycling is a sacred act. Deny it to them and they will go crazy. I’m not kidding. I know one guy who proudly related how he had grabbed some glass jars out of a neighbor’s trash and had dutifully put them in the right bin at his own house. Gaia was saved! to live another day.

    I asked why he bothered, as glass waste is almost universally landfilled. I told him, “It’s made from sand. We will never run out of sand.” He looked like I had kicked his puppy.

  • Casey Klahn June 2, 2018, 9:39 PM

    I used to enjoy going to national parks – the big, ol lodges and rustic vibes. Then they began to put the brushed aluminum cut-out salmon garbage cans right in front of the entrance to the lobby. Big, atrocious, fugly, garbage cans. With sorting holes.

    We get it. You’re into garbage.

  • pbird June 3, 2018, 10:07 AM

    Husband who worked for the Post Office before finally retiring says that the letter carrier Does! know more about you than anyone else!