Recycling, Part 5: A Cast of Real Characters - David Loftus

Most of the time, unless you try to retrieve beverage containers during the day, you probably won’t run into your neighbors in the apartment building's recycling rooms. My schedule has tended to prevent me from collecting until after 11 p.m., but even on weekends I rarely encounter people in the halls or elevators, let alone the recycling rooms. When I have, I suspect they couldn’t imagine what I am really up to: they probably think I am taking recycling to the bins, rather than removing it from them.

Things get more interesting at the supermarket recycling station. It should be no surprise that most of the people you meet there are either homeless or look as if they were. Many of them bring their spoils in sacks, garbage bags, and even purloined shopping carts (despite a warning sign that tells people to keep carts outside, because the floor space between the two banks of recycling machines is fairly narrow). Maybe one in 12 or 15 will be a decently dressed citizen like yourself.

Some of your fellow gleaners are wrinkled, discolored, disfigured by wounds, and filthy; some just look down on their luck. They’re old, they’re young, they’re white and other races; some jabber to one another in other languages (usually Spanish, although I think I’ve heard Chinese and Russian). When I started collecting in fairly cold weather, I was largely spared their body odor; however, a film of spilled alcohol and soda pop on the floor makes it rather sticky as well as giving the space its own peculiar aroma. (I changed into mud boots for this part of the job, then old sandals with hard plastic soles when the weather got hot.)

It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that emptying and unjamming the machines, or washing down the sticky concrete floor, is the low-man-on-the-totem-pole job for supermarket employees. Bottle returners press a button and call into an intercom throughout the day to let the store know somebody needs to come out and fix things.

As you can imagine, I was pleased on those rare occasions when I found the room empty of any other life. But for the most part, my colleagues in the recycling room have been polite and patient. People wait their turn, and apologize for bumping into one another or getting in each other’s way.

It is as if these bedraggled characters are going about their day at the office -- which, in a way, they are. I saw ragtag gleaners give up on a recalcitrant bank of recycling machines and hand off their remaining empties to another stranger waiting his turn.

Hard times have made some of them touchy. One time I left my cart of bottles in the room and went down the block to the supermarket’s loading dock to see if an employee were around to help us out. When I came rushing back to the room, a small older lady growled that she wasn’t going to steal my bottles; stung because that hadn’t even crossed my mind, I answered crossly and defensively to that effect. She apologized.

One time, not realizing a fellow was feeding bottles and cans into two adjacent machines simultaneously, I slid a bottle into the machine he was momentarily not in front of, only to notice that a higher amount than 5 cents appeared on the digital readout. The truth dawned on me and I stepped back in mild but silent disgust, ready to write off the lost bottle, but he dug into his pocket and refunded me the nickel that he would collect inside for my bottle.

To be honest, my colleagues at the redeeming machines disgust me far less than my respectable neighbors who can't be bothered to redeem the money they spent on beverage containers at the checkout stand, stuff the wrong things in the recycling bins, tear the labels off bottles and crush the plastic and aluminum so thoroughly that the machines can’t read them, don't rinse out their soda and beer bottles and food cans, push paper and limes and other flotsam into cans and bottles, and throw food and other non-recyclables into the recycling bins when they belong in the garbage chute.

At least the homeless folks are doing something useful for themselves. Lazy or ignorant or impudent neighbors are shoving off more work on other people.


Read part 1, the overview of my experiment


Read part 2, diving for cans and bottles


Read part 3, a visit to the loading dock


Read part 4, the recycling machines