Bottle of Bubbly Presents a Recycling Dilemma

Sometimes I long for the days before our trash was unified, when we all had back-yard incinerators. The late afternoon, when most people burned their trash, used to be a rather pleasant time of day.

The smoke from the neighborhood’s incinerators gave the sunsets a not unlovely dusky look, and the smell of burning paper was rather like that of burning wood in a fireplace.

I never thought incinerator smoke contributed to harmful smog, like burning gasoline, but the experts condemned it and it was banned. (Whatever happened, by the way, to those hundreds of thousands of back-yard incinerators? Were they all dumped into a landfill?)

What brings on this perhaps maverick notion is the abuse I have received from readers for consigning a great deal of junk to the trash when we cleaned out our garage. Several pointed out that we are running out of landfills and that throwing out trash is in fact a sin.

As I have said, some things can’t be recycled, and if we don’t throw out our trash we must leave it to our children, who will have to deal with it when there are even fewer landfills.

I can sympathize with Kathi Kennedy of Pacific News Service, whose timely article on recycling was published in this section recently under the headline, “The Garbage That Ate Our Lives.”

She told how her Berkeley commune started out conscientiously to recycle everything, only to become so obsessed with that undertaking that “we now process a cornucopia of waste products which must be washed, rinsed, delabeled, crushed, sorted, or boxed, and then taken to the recycler’s.” As a consequence, conversation centers on recycling and she and her friends are becoming bores.

A reader has sent me a flyer from a recycling company which seems to verify Kennedy’s alarm. My wife and I try to separate our trash now, as we are urged to do. We have two trash containers in our kitchen, one for disposable trash and one for aluminum, glass and other recyclable materials.

I am not sure what is recyclable and what isn’t. If the flyer is correct, I’m afraid we are not doing the right thing. It says, for instance, that containers must not be food covered. Does that mean that every time I open a can of chili for lunch I have to wash the can before I toss it? All right, I can do that. But do I have to remove the label? Have you ever tried to remove a label from a can? You can’t get rid of the glue.

It says that labels must be removed from plastic beverage bottles; that clear and tinted bottles must be separated, and flattened. How do you flatten a plastic bottle?

It says glass containers are OK but they must be rinsed and clear glass should be separated from colored. We have been throwing clear glass in with colored. Does the city separate them? Or are we sinning?

Last night we had a bottle of champagne to celebrate our wedding anniversary. We stayed home and watched Clint Eastwood and Bernadette Peters in “Pink Cadillac.” It had a lot of sex and violence and both the stars were great. But this morning I noticed that my wife had tossed the champagne bottle in the recycleable trash container. Was that wrong? It’s tinted dark green, and it has a lot of gold foil around the neck. The flyer says no foil.

The flyer says newspapers are acceptable, if clean and dry; but not magazines, telephone books, catalogues, rubber bands, and string. I save all our magazines for a retired friend. Just delivering them to him every month or two is a major logistic operation.

But what are we to do with our catalogues? My wife must be on the mailing list of every mail order house in the country. Not a day goes by that there aren’t new catalogues in the mail. Either they go into the trash, and ultimately a landfill, or we leave them for our children. Nothing is so useless as an out-of-date catalogue.

I save rubber bands. I toss them into a cardboard box. I have thousands of rubber bands. There is no way that I can ever use them. There aren’t a lot of things that one needs rubber bands for. Then how do I happen to have so many? I’m sure our children will inherit them someday.

I do not save string. It goes into the trash, and ultimately, I suppose, into a landfill. I had an uncle once who saved string; he wound it into an enormous ball, and when that one got too big to handle he started a new one; but he had a psychological problem.

It may seem that I am making a mountain out of a molehill here, but, as Kennedy suggested, recycling is soon going to become a central fact of our lives, more important to our survival than recreation, diet, exercise and social intercourse.

Unless I can get a ruling on champagne bottles, maybe I’ll start by giving up champagne.