The first few times I put a glass beer bottle in an automatic recycling machine, years ago, and heard the explosive crash of the container shattering into tiny pieces inside, I cringed.
It’s a perfectly good bottle, I thought. Why not strip the paper label, disinfect the glass, and refill it, instead of having to manufacture a whole new bottle from scratch? I suppose if there were some way to sort each one out and return it to the company that uses that color and shape -- Heineken, Miller, Bud, Beck’s, Corona, and especially the many lovely microbreweries in my home town (some just blocks from where I live, such as Bridgeport, Portland Brewing, Rogue, and Henry Weinhard’s) -- then that might be possible.
But with millions of glass bottles returned every year in the state of Oregon, neither the supermarkets at one end nor the breweries and beer distributors at the other can spare the time and personnel to sort through the flotsam and retrieve the particular thousands they use. Middlemen -- the businesses that collect the raw glass (and plastic, and aluminum) and turn over new bottles to the folks who put stuff in them (or more likely, some other middle men who reshape the fragments of glass and plastic and aluminum into new containers) -- are necessary players in the process.
After I’d gotten into the habit of feeding dozens of glass bottles into the maw of the recycling machine on every visit, those glass explosions became a kind of music to my ears. It was the sound of money -- not a lot of money, but a fair amount over time -- pouring into my pocket, figuratively speaking. The same with the crackle of the plastic soda and water bottles being crushed, and the crinkle of the aluminum cans.
If the glass and plastic and aluminum containers were not smashed and crushed and flattened in the machines, the bins inside (which are long and narrow -- maybe 4 feet by a foot-and-a-half across, and less than 3 feet deep -- with only two at the bottom of each machine) would fill up a lot faster. Just one homeless man with a garbage bag full of plastic Coke bottles or aluminum Bud cans could do it … which would leave the rest of us standing around, cursing alongside the other homeless men and women who have been pulling containers out of city trash barrels and picking them off the ground.
So the glass bottles are reduced to their constituent materials, and the aluminum and plastic containers get wrenched and collapsed. Even so, with a steady parade of homeless people and occasional well-dressed tree-huggers like yours truly, the collecting machines fill up pretty fast. As soon as they’re full, they reject anything further and spit out a receipt for the bottles and cans you’ve fed into them, whether you’re finished or not.
Most supermarkets try to minimize traffic jams by hosting two collection machines of each type: two for glass, two for aluminum cans, and two for plastic bottles. But it’s not that hard for both machines of each type to fill up, or for one to fill and the other to jam.
At least I can take my unfinished load back to a storage locker inside the building. It’s got to be more frustrating for a street person who has no such option, except to wander across the city in search of another bank of recycling machines.
[Interim report: When I began this project on April 17, I wondered if I could make a hundred dollars off my neighbors in a year. That turned out to take less than six weeks. This evening, I passed the $150 mark. Since April 17, I have redeemed 3,012 glass, aluminum, and plastic containers -- all collected from recycling bins in my apartment building (with maybe a couple dozen handed to me by passersby, left on the sidewalk outside the supermarket recycling station, or scrounged from the return slots of the machines and abandoned by gleaners who couldn’t get the machines to accept them) -- worth a total of $150.60 at 5 cents a pop. We’ve used that money to buy cat food, cat litter, cookies, half-and-half, shampoo, deodorant, and other stuff from the store on the ground floor. The other night, I used the money to buy roses for Carole.]
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