Recycling Death

The old recycling game is no longer a matter of chucking everything away in the trash & feeling good because you put old newspapers out to be collected up & turned into old newspapers. In Berkeley these days we have a more complex & it must be said much more challenging system. Old newspapers still go where they belong -- a vast wasteland of advertising is sent to be turned into more unwanted advertising. The plastics -- an occupation that you would be well advised to consider -- go mostly into a blue bin for plastics, except for the plastic stuff that doesn't go there because it needs to be taken to Marin. Ditto, the glass. And now there is the food, which includes not just unconsumed delicacies, but also tea bags, paper towels & milk cartons (but not the plastic tops -- they go to Marin) -- this goes into a little green (clever choice of colour there) bin which resides under the sink until Monday night when it is emptied into the much bigger green compost bin. Then you take the green compost bin, the grey garbage bin, and the blue plastics/glass bin and move them to the street, where some of their contents will be taken away in the night by homeless people.

This is all to the good, no doubt. But one cannot help but feel that this system plays on our fear of waste materials, our reptilian disgust with what the body cannot incorporate, our deep need to feel completely clean & pure, because if we recycle everything then we are free of the burden of considering that which we produce & also fear -- that which is left over, that which we revile. It's rubbish, it's trash, it's what the body has in mind -- death.

Which is also probably why we tend not to look garbage disposal workers (dustmen, we used to call them) in the eyes.