Recycling, Part 3: Down to the Loading Dock - David Loftus

My apartment is located among an unusual mixture of permanent residents -- well-to-do and not-so-affluent -- and white collar transients.

When the place was built, about ten years ago, the developers cut a deal with the city that probably involved some financing or tax breaks in return for a promise to rent a certain number of units to low-income folks.

A portion of the residents -- let’s say half -- are happily permanent (which includes my wife and me); but a variety of folks pass through for only a month to a year or two at a time: home buyers waiting for a purchase to close, employees of high-tech companies and hospitals in town on temporary assignment (last summer, this group included Aldis Hodge, a star of Timothy Hutton’s TNT cable series “Leverage”), and students at the adjacent university.

Since many in that mix are from out of state (even from outside the U.S. -- I’ve heard German, French, and Oriental chatter in the elevator), perhaps some of them are simply ignorant of the practice of recycling in Oregon. You’d think they could read the signs on the doors and walls of the recycling rooms, but judging by the cardboard in the paper bin, the glass in the aluminum and tin can bin, the plastic in the glass bin, and even food in both, that is too much to ask.

Twice a week, on Monday and Thursday night, a custodial employee wheels all the blue recycling bins to the ground-floor loading dock for pickup the following morning. You might think this would make scrounging easier: everything’s gathered at one spot rather than spread out between six different floors.

But that’s not necessarily the case. By this time, most of the bins are stuffed, so you have to do a lot of digging through paper, tin cans, and un-recyclable glass and plastic (such as an increasingly popular Lipton Green Tea with citrus drink; only beer, carbonated soda, and bottled water containers qualify under the law, remember) and possibly even risk a close encounter with stale food or broken glass. Also, you have to wrestle the bins around the concrete floor because they’re all jammed up against one another.

Another feature of the loading dock, since the trash chute feeds from all six recycling rooms on the floors above and into the enclosed dumpster down here, is the occasional sound of the neighbors' trash sliding down the metal chute into the huge metal container. It's a surprisingly soft and gentle sound, but it still startles you since you don't expect to hear evidence of anyone else in the place.

So, partly depending on my time (whether I have plenty to spare, or my watch says it’s near or after midnight) I strike a medium between visits to the various floors and the loading dock, and how far down into the bins I choose to dig for Coors Lite and Rockstar cans, and plastic Coke and Aquafina water bottles.

So far, I would imagine most of what I've described sounds pretty mundane. You may have collected bottles and cans for redeeming yourself; even if you don't live in a state that has a bottle deposit for returned containers, you could easily picture most of what I've discussed. But the next stop is the recycling room, with the machines that devour cans and bottles and read their bar codes automatically, where you'll be stepping on the wet sticky floor and sharing a small room with homeless men and women. How many of you have done that on a regular basis?

Next: the recycling machines

Read part 1, the project overview

Read part 2, diving for cans and bottles in the recycling bins