Friday’s Headlines

7 comments

1. I’m not taking any more re-education about recycling and garbage, I’m fed up with the neverending rule changes that don’t take the citizens into consideration.
   I called for a metal pickup from the city, I put it out the night before and it wasn’t deemed acceptable to the crew that came because the lengths of iron pipe were a bit too long. What am I supposed to do, rent a saw to cut them a bit smaller for the weaklings?
   Fuck the city.

2. Its funny how such a big issue like garbage disposal is now having an effect on recycling. Even if you can get larger bins at no cost there’s nothing preventing people from just tossing their extra recyclables into the trash. We should really hit the recyclibg problem at the source; the packaging companies. Just for a box of cookies you have the outside paper bag, a plastic wrapping inside, and then a plastic tray to keep your cookies all organized (even though some still come broken).

3. The garbage guys rarely empty the bins even when they are properly loaded and used properly. They just let the lift gadget dump them in the truck and anything that does not come out in that second or so the bin is inverted is left back on your curb for two weeks later. Very sloppy work. The program is a disaster.

4. Personally, I find the giant bins very convenient, and a great improvement on the tiny blue boxes of old. To me, the program is a success.

5. Michal,

   I agree. Those plastic cookie trays are a nuisance. Never has so little material occupied so much space.

6. “We should really hit the recyclibg problem at the source; the packaging companies.”

   Amen.

   Sometimes it seems like the whole recycling thing is a huge boondoggle contrived to burn gas and create jobs by trucking the stuff around. And now there’s a green dumpster by my building – as if we’re all going to save rotting veggie peels in our apartments and take them down in the elevator. Just put in garburators in the kitchen sinks – no smell, no trucking, no middle men.

7. From the Post’s recycling article:

   “When you have materials that aren’t inside the blue bin, especially in an automated system, as the truck grabs it, the stuff spills out all over the place,” Mr. Orpin said. “It makes the city look like a mess.”

   And it looks tidy with the sidewalks rendered all but impassable by the scattered, mostly-empty bins thrown there by the trucks’ Hydraulic Clobbering Arms? Seriously, look at the wreckage on, say, Sunnyside Avenue after the truck’s been by, and imagine getting down the sidewalk with any of various mobility impairments that would preclude stepping from sidewalk to street and back again every fifteen or twenty feet. It’s bad enough when the big bins are out there awaiting collection and not yet kicked over with their lids yawning.

   (And it’s not like light bits of paper and plastic reliably make it into the trucks even when they start out completely in the bins. The shiny new system is just too “high tech” to do a good job, I guess.)