It all goes in together

Last week, we went to the annual condominium owners' meeting. When we first moved in two years ago, B went to the annual meeting, at which two of the residents nearly had fisticuffs over--yes, this is the sad truth--a missing shutter. Neither of us was anxious to see a repeat performance (if I don't watch Jerry Springer on TV, why would I want to see something similar in person?), but one item on this year's agenda interested us--recycling was finally coming to our complex.

(In grammar-related news, I stumbled over the placement of the apostrophe in the first sentence, and I'm not convinced that I'm right, but I'm not convinced that the other option is better. I'm also not sure if my usage of fisticuffs is correct. Stream-of-consciousness writing is now over, and we'll return to our regularly scheduled blog entry.)

For the last two years, I have separated recyclable items from garbage out of habit and then thrown the recyclable items and the garbage items into the same dumpster because recycling was heretofore not an option for us (but making the effort to separate the items made me feel as if I were making some effort, though in hindsight, of course I was doing nothing but delaying the inevitable). It was sad to throw away items that I knew could be recyled, and I was thrilled to find out that we no longer had to.

(Technically, I myself haven't thrown anything into the dumpster--that's B's job. I think I went out there with him once, but it was scary and dark and smelly, and I haven't been back since. Shirking garbage responsibility is a particular skill of mine, in fact. I lived in Florida for 10 months, and I don't think I took the garbage to the dumpster once in that entire time. The secret is to find out the chores that others don't want to do, and do them, so they don't get angry with you for not doing your fair share of garbage duty. Anyway. Back to recycling.)

At our condo meeting, we learned that recycling is going to be even easier than ever because we can just throw everything in together in one bin. Glass, paper, plastic, metals cans--it all goes in together, and then a fantastic recycling plant takes care of sorting it all out and sending our plastic bottles away to be turned into frisbees and park benches and who knows what else. We saw a little movie about the plant and are considering taking a field trip to learn more.

Ever since we started sorting our garbage and recyclables (with real conviction, and now knowing how much we actually can recycle), we've come to the sad/happy realization that about 75% of our garbage actually can be recycled. It's sad because we've been throwing all of this stuff away for the past two years! But it's happy because we aren't going to do that anymore.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, the two would-be pugilists were missing from the meeting, so the event was calm. The lowlights were a 30-minute discussion of landscaping (Seriously? Thirty minutes about trees, grass, and bark mulch?) and an even longer discussion about the installation of Verizon Fios.

Unless next year's agenda features a dancing bear, I'm pretty sure we're going to skip it.