Our family carbon footprint is probably that of an overfed yeti with Himalayan toe-bloat and we don’t yet run one of those hybrid cars which are made out of wattle and run on lentils or something, but Sooz and I do our best when it comes to recycling.
The local council pick up garden refuse, paper and cans every week. I’m constantly embarrassed by the number of beer cans. “Good party?” ask our neighbours. “Uhh, yes. Yes, party, right. Ahem.” I mutter, looking shifty.
I’ve taken to holding back the empty dog food tins so that I can put them in a layer on top of the Budweiser empties, but as the neighbourhood knows that we have only a terrier small enough to use a cat flap, it’s pretty obvious that I’m hiding something.
Anyway, that’s not the point. The point is that, while the council collect the cans, we have to take glass and plastic bottles to the recycling centre ourselves.
Glass is okay. I don’t have a problem with glass, apart from the tiny broken shards that sometimes creep into the box and lacerate my best bass-playing finger when I’m not paying attention.
Wine bottles are great. They’re a reminder of gentle, drunken evenings with friends. Their very greenness is pleasing to the eye, particularly when the sun’s shining through them. And when you force them through the rubber grommetty things there’s a gorgeous suspended moment and then a satisfying crash. "I love the sound of breaking glass", as Nick Lowe once put it. And who doesn’t?
It’s the plastic bottles I can’t abide. There’s something fat and smug and insolent and yet insubstantial about them. They bounce out of the crate because they’ve been stacked too high, and anyway you should know better than to try to stack them because they don’t weigh anything.
They make an irritating flubbery bonking sound as they hit the floor, and you want to kill them by stamping but you don’t because it will do no good and that makes you insane with rage.
One day I’m going to follow them all the way to the place where they recycle them in the hope that I can watch them burn.
2 comments:
I have to take all of my recycling to a depot on the other side of town. In winter the lot glazes over with ice.
One day I was dropping off my stuff when another fellow showed up. He was trying to carry large sheets of cardboard from his truck to the cardboard repository a couple at a time. Unfortunately for his it was a very windy day. It was fun to watch the wind catch him and and sail him across the lot.
I know, I'm a sadistic bastard.
LibertyBob
I believe the German word for delighting in other people's misfortune is "schadenfreude".
Hard to believe we never got around to inventing one in English, seeing as hoe we enjoy it so much.
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