Saturday Recycling

Aluminum pot: "Now I find myself inside a zero-sort recycling bin. I feel kind of sad being all alone after years of cooking great dishes in the house. The recycling truck just came yesterday, so except for me, this place is empty."

Crash, Bang, Thud, Tinkle, Tinkle, Gong. Thud.

Great – I am no longer alone! Who just came in? I see wine bottles, green beer bottles and a plastic soda bottle. Have you been here before?"

Chardonnay bottle: "Huh?"

Aluminum pot: "Have you been recycled before? We are in a recycling bin."

Chardonnay bottle: "I don't know. This seems new and scary for me. I just held fermented grape juice for the lady in the house to get drunk."

Aluminum pot: "The people who live in the house that we came from recognize that we all have value beyond what they initially used us for. By putting us into this recycling bin, they will be doing their part to not trash the planet. Things will be added all week long until the recycling truck comes on Friday to take us away. At the recycling center, we will be sorted out based on what we are made of and ultimately sent to another place to be reused for a different purpose; something new."

Chardonnay bottle: "What do you mean used for different purpose? How do you know all this stuff anyway?"

Aluminum pot: "Well, you are made out of glass. Glass has lots of uses besides being wine bottles. Glass is basically melted sand and has been recycled for hundreds of years. It's likely that you will be melted down again and changed into something else. Maybe you will become a window for somebody's house or another kind of bottle. Maybe you will be a wine glass, stained glass for a church, or a car window where you would get to see all sorts of fun places. Maybe you would become a lens in binoculars or a telescope – looking at birds and stars - what fun that would be. Being recycled – looking to a brighter future can be fun to think about.

I understand recycling because I have been recycled before and I remember it. Being made out of aluminum means that I have many, many uses in people's lives. Once I was part of a fighter airplane. I got to be part of a dog fight and shot down an enemy plane. It was quite a thrill. I remember this because I did not have to be melted down to be used again. I was able to just be removed from the airplane and formed into the pot that I am now. The reason I'm in the recycling bin, is that the son in the house was trying to use me to make a casserole and put me in the oven where I did not belong. The oven heat melted my handle and they didn't want to use me anymore because of that. So here I am looking forward to my next role in life."

Chardonnay bottle: "Getting recycled sounds very scary I'm not sure I like this."

Aluminum pot: "Well, actually there's no escape from being recycled. Everybody who will be in here was once part of the planet that the people in the house call Earth. The entire planet is one giant recycling processor. Everything on the planet living or not ultimately will be recycled. This even includes mountains, rivers, oceans, including the people who live in the house that we came from. Rain was once water in a lake, stream or ocean. It evaporated into the sky. Became a cloud and rain or snow just to start the cycle all over again. Water people drink is thousands, even millions of years old.

Chardonnay bottle: "You mean to say that on Friday when the recycling truck comes again we're all going to be taken to someplace where we will be processed into another useful item? Are there any alternatives? I'm getting scared."

Aluminum pot: "Yes there are alternatives. The people in the house could have thrown us into the trash. In that case, we would have just been hauled off to an incinerator where we would be burned polluting the atmosphere, or to a landfill and buried, or put on a barge and dumped at sea. In some places, the burning items in an incinerator are used to make electricity – a good use and still a form of recycling changing items into energy. If this was a farm or ranch, some of us might be used to make compost and help plants grow. In the landfill, things like food scraps, dirty diapers, newspapers and the like, will start to rot and make a lot of methane which must be burned or risk an explosion - not good for the planet or the people. Speaking of food scraps, I just saw something that said the humans throw away 40% of the food they buy. That typically goes to landfills where they decompose and create methane. The methane could have other beneficial uses.

If we got put on a garbage barge, hauled out to sea and dumped in the ocean, the planet itself decides our fate except for plastic. The planet can't figure out what to do with the plastic. Plastic doesn't rot or break down. In either of those cases it isn't really good for the planet itself. The humans on the planet create a lot of trash on their own. Landfills become overflowing and there are things like us that could be reused for better purposes rather than just making a big pile on the planet. If were dumped into the ocean, we could end up polluting the seas and even killing some of the wildlife that lives there. So, you see, being in the recycling bin is the best solution for everybody concerned.

The whole story of recycling and how important it is came to light in the late 1980's with the infamous Islip garbage barge. The town of Islip on Long Island, New York had a problem – its garbage dump was getting too full, so they loaded 3,000 tons of garbage on a barge thinking it would be easy to find another place that would accept it but no one wanted it. The Islip garbage got wide and initially comical attention. Ultimately, the tugboat dragged the barge over 6,000 miles trying to find a place that would take the trash. They went as far as Mexico with no takers. It finally ended up back in New York with Brooklyn taking the trash and burning it.

The Islip garbage barge incident drew attention to overflowing dumps everywhere and the need to recycle was highlighted. Good things can come from things that look bad at first. There is a global organization called Greenpeace that grew as a result of the Islip barge incident. Greenpeace does a lot more than encourage recycling by people. Greenpeace went after large companies, manufacturing and oil companies to point out the messes they were making not to mention the military which has a very bad record of leaving behind very toxic waste that was poorly discarded. Big companies don't like to be 'corrected' so things got tense at times."

Thunk, Thud, Clink, Tink

Aluminum pot: "What's this? Let's see, we have the Hawk Herald, a national newspaper written by and for people with extreme right wing, 'conservative views' (Whatever that means) The Dove Digest, also a national newspaper written by and for people with extreme left wing, 'liberal views' (Whatever that means) and the Driveway Nail, a driveway throw-away local newspaper that actually has unbiased and...