Chasing arrows do not guarantee safe passage from shelf to curb to factory to shelf again.

Not all numbers within the triangle (Resin Identification Code) are accepted for recycling.

I'm SO THANKFUL the city switched to one giant comingled bin.

Here's how it was: one bin for cans - my favorite thing to recycle. When everything worked out you might have a few shiny flat envelopes that used to be cans of soup. Since I rarely eat canned soup this bin was never full.

For some inexplicable reason manufacturers created new cans that could only be opened on the top. You could never crush them completely nor you you easily empty them by puncturing the bottom to relieve the vacuum. However, even without crushing, the bin was NEVER full.

They’d like me to take the paper off the cans and put it in the mixed paper. It doesn’t always happen, but it’s usually gone anyway. I’m sure the sorters are taking all the screw-ups out and putting them in the regular trash.The newspaper bin was almost never full. I’d bring home the Sunday paper just so I have something to put into the newsprint bin. When I was pounding the pavement for a job I'd at least have the classifieds, and I'm hooked on all the free papers: the Stranger, the Seattle Weekly, the Sitting Duck, the CPJ, Works in Progress, the Green Pages and assorted others. Still the newspaper bin was almost never full. Papers went in, but they also came out - to line the bird cages Cocolina and Peach Tortatilla, rendering them all poopy and unrecyclable. However, you can compost old papers with bird poop and cast off feed. I did. Try the tomatoes.They gave you one more bin for glass, but they let you mix in those juice box style containers that now hold a variety of liquids. Our family buys cases of them: almond milk, rice milk, oat milk, hemp milk, hazelnut milk and soy milk. And soup.This bin was ALWAYS FULL. You can't crush the glass and those boxes pop back if you try. Something never made sense to me. Aren't those boxes made of a waxpaper cardboard plastic polymer with food residue always left inside? It seemed like they ought to go with the paper, or the cardboard, or the plastic... or the garbage!Well, the nice recycling company allows us to give back all the plastic we want, but it won't necessarily recycle it, and they don't provide a container.

The schmucks in the trucks don't have the time to check the cardinal coding of the signifying digits, and neither do I.

I eats my products and pitches the tub into an old milk crate (formerly used for cows milk, either in glass bottles, paper boxes or plastic jugs). Usually, the stuff would go to the curb and disappear, but it always left a bad after taste in my mind. "What if I messed up? Will they throw away this whole batch because of that oat milk box cap?"

What the family and I always always accumulated was mixed paper. The company expected their customers to pack those items in a brown paper bag. All variety of junk mail (that is, business correspondence often addressed to 'Our friends at...') gets delivered by the nice letter carrier, only to be carried from the mailbox to the brown paper bag. Also, the non-corrugated cardboard boxes of Kashi Go Lean crunch cereal, Annie's peace pasta, and Planet automatic dishwashing detergent.

I mean I go to a lot of trouble to gather together products in my shopping cart that will work together: cheese with chips and salsa, but now my plastic salsa container doesn’t get recycled because it’s the wrong kind of plastic! Plus the top is wider than the bottom. Why do they sell this then? So I can dip the chips right into the salsa without getting a bowl dirty. Well, I can wash the bowl and reuse it, but what am I going to do with an empty salsa container? Re-use it? All the leftovers in my fridge are in salsa containers and yogurt containers and butter tubs. You have to have separate shelves for things in their actual containers and things masquerading as something else. Throw it away! If go to the trouble of buying a glass jar of salsa then they tell me that the rubber safety liner in the metal lid makes it impossible to recycle. What am I supposed to do? Throw it away? Reuse it as a glass? Works fine for Bloody Mary’s, but if you don’t want salsa flavored milk forget it. You could run it through the dishwasher a few times to get rid of the flavor and the label. Then you get little label bits all over your clean glasses. Sometimes they wonder why I drink tap water from cupped hands.
Anyway, I sort the recycling the best I can.

... and then there's Batteries

I just figured out the battery conspiracy.

I’ve been listening to my new MP3 player, and I thought it was the greatest thing since the Walkman. It’s the most economical way for me to tune out all of you.
I’ve gone through my share of Walkmen as we all probably have, and with them we’ve gone through more than our share of batteries: usually a pair of double As. Then rechargeable batteries were invented, and it seemed like the music would simply flow freely forever.

Until somebody forgot to pay the electric bill, and the electric company almost always lets you forget and pay more later. After a few years went by those rechargeable batteries wouldn’t hold a charge, and we had to replace them. Then someone invented a new (and incompatible with the old rechargers) kind of battery. All was well again. Time for an upgrade. Then with miniaturization, the MP3 player came into my life, and it only used ONE triple A battery!
Instead of flipping the cassette; instead of auto-replay; instead of switching CDs; instead of a CD full of MP3s even; I had music and data accessible 24/7 in a box smaller than a Zippo lighter!
Then one day my AAA wouldn’t recharge. It had been less than a year and less than a dozen charges (I thought). I went into the convenience store and asked the Asian guy, “Got any batteries?” He pointed in the glass case at an open box of AAAs and asked, “How many you want?” “Just one,” I said. “$1.06”.

It died right in the middle of a song a few days later. Why!? Why couldn’t you just die in my sleep?

So I went to pitch it in the garbage, but you’ve got to look both ways ‘cuz everybody knows that batteries don’t really go in the garbage. They have to be separated and recycled in a special way at a special place. All this separation is driving me crazy to begin with, and I try to get away without doing it whenever possible.

So where are the dead batteries supposed to go, and what’s happening to them? Do we only think they’re dead? Is it that they are only Mostly Dead? People said we had to separate the batteries because they were full of toxic chemicals: battery acid, lead, heavy metals or whatever. I’m thinking, what’s the big deal? Is a dead battery going to explode and spray acid onto the disposable diapers and rubber lined metal salsa jar lids and plastic yogurt tubs? Underground? Way over at the dump? It’s the least of my worries. I’m worried about getting $1.06 for my post-modern crack: constant MP3s into the brain, and making sure I know whether the positive end or the negative end sticks up.
Okay, in the name of thoroughness I review the types of batteries and notice something odd. It starts with AA then AAA and jumps straight over B to C & D. Where did B go? B got disappeared to camp X ray, all the useful vital fluids were transferred over to the brutes C & D cells. You remember D? D fills the big police flashlights that crack the skulls of those fools who cross the perimeter out of the protest zone.
Then they skip the rest of the alphabet and the first 8 numbers until we reach the 9-Volt.

I’m the 9-Volt; don’t put my hat on wrong. Lick me!

I make a shrieking sound when there’s a fire in your house. WHEEP WHEEP WHEEP! And then I whine down annoyingly as I die, “Oh, I’ve been waiting for a fire! Why don’t you burn this house down already?! wwwwheeep..wheep.wheep”
Of course, there’s lots of other weird geeky batteries for the myriad assorted sundry gizmos of modern life, and they’re all incompatible, and they usually cost more than buying a new gizmo after you factor in the trouble of finding the right one, and where it goes, and the right screwdriver to get at it, and then sorting the cardboard from the plastic bubble it was sold in. All so you can have a LASER pointer that shows a smiley face.
Then you’re supposed to go to the special recycling place with the mostly dead old battery. What do they call the special place? The HazOhouse. It’s genius. It’s Marketing 101. We found it was too scary for the kids to connect with if we kept calling it HAZARDOUS HOUSE. Now it’s like another ride at the Carnival. After the Raging Waters we come to HazOhouse! In other parts of the country they’ve renamed some other places that seemed too scary. In Arkansas they send criminals to Ja-O-l. In Tennessee sinners go to He-O-ll.
I dumped a battery in the garbage and it sank to the bottom instantly with a thunk. I thought about all the mostly dead batteries in the garbage and realized that because they’re heavy metals, they were all going to sink to the bottom of each bag and when they started leaking, they would be free. They’d all start swimming like those things in the matrix and joining up to form one gigantic battery: the single A.