99 Bottles of Beer

The contents of your recycling bins can reveal much about you. The extent to which you recycle, for example: is every plastic tidbit included? junk mail? hard-to-clean jars, such as peanut butter? Or for that matter, do you recycle at all, or believe that it’s a total waste of time? too much of a hassle? or that the city hauls it all off to the dump on the sly?

Walking around my neighborhood on Recycling Day is always a trip. It’s a strange form of voyeurism, this recycling-bin-peeping, but I admit to being fascinated by what ends up at the curb. One house presents a neat rectangle of newspapers, tied up with string, proper Martha-style. Another’s blue bin regularly holds two soda cans, nothing else. Flattened cardboard boxes indicate who has new Fisher Price Playhouses or flat-screen tvs. One bin is filled with baby formula cans, another is inexplicably full of empty bean tins. (Is there a new all-bean diet out? If so, does it work?).

The funnest part of bin-peeping is imagining the sorts of people who fill them up, and drawing correlations (no doubt erroneous) between what’s in their bins and their personalities and opinions. For instance, the house that has wrestling magazines and white wine bottles–two products that don’t vibe in many world views. Or the house that presents every article cleansed to the point of sterilization; I imagine someone chasing the lone surviving roach around the hermetically sealed house at midnight. Then there’s my college-aged neighbor who doesn’t recycle at all, though cases of beer are regularly toted into the house. (The fact that they’re carried in by rather stout young men in their early twenties, all sporting heavily starched buttondowns and ‘W - still The President’ stickers on their trucks adds to the picture).

And THEN there’s our house. A bit of history: recycling was a pilot program in Hyde Park in the early 80’s, which I embraced with ecstatic zealotry. The Container Store served up three cobalt blue bins (which we still have) and I was off into the world of recycling. So now it’s all completely second nature–when we remodeled the kitchen in 1995 I added pull-out recycling bins, and put baskets upstairs to gather paper and such. Needless to say, our weekly curbside pile is huge, and (compared to the meager offerings of the neighbors) quite profligate.

I suppose we should feel at least a little embarrassed. In my defense, the water bottle was put back into the bag. Plus I always try to catch the recycling guys and give them cold drinks, in hopes they won’t run screaming down the street.