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RecyclablesJanuary 06, 2006 Friday is trash day in my neighborhood. It takes me six to eight weeks to fill up a regulation-size trash barrel; it's only been a couple of weeks since I last put the barrel out, with a $4 sticker attached, so this wasn't the week. Recyclables, yeah, it was time for recyclables. I borrowed a regulation bin from my downstairs neighbor (the town department of public works doesn't like my container and warned me some months back that they wouldn't collect my recyclables unless I put them in an acceptable bin) and dumped my plastics, tin, and glass into it. On top I set two piles of newsprint and magazines, tied up with baling twine, and against the lot I leaned my stash of cardboard. When I headed out to the barn around 12:15, the trash truck had long since been and gone, but recyclables hadn't been collected yet. They were gone by the time I got home around 5:00. That's pretty much the usual: trash is gone by 8:00 at the latest; the recyclable crew either sleeps late or works slower. In my town, Tisbury, aka Vineyard Haven, you don't have to sort plastics from glass from metal. Maybe it's done by machine somewhere, or maybe the junk all ends up in the big off-island incinerator: I don't know and most of the time I don't care, as long as I don't have to pay to have the recyclables trucked away. A few years ago you could only recycle HDPE 2 plastics. I got into the habit of noticing the numbers on the underside of each container. Now, it seems, you can recycle anything. I still notice the numbers. Plenty of my neighbors don't; they don't take the tops off the jugs or the labels off the cans either. I like my neighbors, but really, what is their problem? I get my mail in West Tisbury. Long story; the short version is that when I moved here I hijacked my family's p.o. box. I've moved something like 10 times in 20 years but my mailing address hasn't changed. Comes in handy. At the West Tisbury p.o. bins are set out to receive the recyclables: catalogues, old issues of the M.V. Times, other newspaper-like stuff. Everybody knows that the recyclables go in the bins but the trash, like junk mail, goes in the barrel near the door. West Tisbury prides itself in its intelligence. It calls itself the Athens of Martha's Vineyard. Lots of smaht people live in West Tisbury. My question: If so many smaht people live in West Tisbury, why is there always so much junk mail in the recycle bins? While I'm sorting my mail, sometimes I surreptitiously watch the townsfolk -- many of whom I know by name, and some even better than that -- dumping their junk mail into the recycle bins. I shake my head but so far I haven't had the nerve to ask, "Why the hell are you dumping your non-recyclable junk into the recycle bins?" A couple of times a day, more in summer, p.o. employees have to do the sorting for them. There's a moral in there, something about crummily paid employees having to do the scutwork for smaht people, but I haven't figured it out yet.
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