Throwing out the trash is too much work.

[Jamie (K)]

I've started to get annoyed at how throwing away trash at my house is becoming more and more time-consuming.

When I was a kid, we just threw everything in the trash can.

Now, with environmental consciousness and recycling, I am being required to do more and more work. I have to put the cardboard together and tie it up into bundles. It's the same thing with newspapers. I have to sort the glass by color. I'm supposed to check the type of plastic I'm throwing out to make sure it's one of the types that the recyclers will take. I have to take the labels off of cans and smash them. Sometimes the labels don't want to come off, and I have to spend time picking the parts that are stuck. Batteries have to be packaged in a certain way to be picked up. At work, I have to throw away paper by category -- white or colored. However, it's sometimes hard to tell what they mean by white, and what they think is colored, so I probably end up putting a lot of white paper into the bin for colored sheets.

All of this takes more and more of my time, as the recycling people get pickier and pickier about all the work they want us to do before they'll take our trash. I have many other things demanding my time, and only my generational feeling of eco-guilt is motivating me to cooperate at this point. However, since so many things the ecology movement tells us turn out to be lies or exaggerations these days, I'm starting to lose that guilt and am almost ready to start throwing everything in the trash can again.

[Lost_Soul]

Hi, Jamie

You will be laughing, but in Russia all this job is done by vagrants - once you empty your kitchen midden (or whatever you call it) into an even bigger midden (which is usually found in the court around any house), it is besieged by vagabonds who start picking and sorting the trash (stumping on tin cans so they will take less space, stashing away bottles and so on). They collect trash in this way and hand it in to special companies for money. A savage custom, must I say, but I am not to change it.
However I don't know how this greasy business is done in the US

[Jamie (K)]

[Yankee]

I remember a sort of "recycling scandal" when I was living in Germany. We had to separate recyclable cans, plastic, packaging, etc. Cans and plastic containers had to be clean, of course -- i.e. you had to wash them, which naturally involved using (wasting) drinking water. The big scandal came when it was discovered that large quantities of carefully separated recyclables were being tossed back together and simply incinerated.
.

[Jamie (K)]