Recycling
Fiction
There are four brightly colored recycling bins in front of you; which one does your magenta plastic bottle go into?
Bottles
“Could you take Jack to school?” Susan asked.
“Sure thing, it is on my way to the recycling bins,” Ron said. “Hop on in, Jack.”
Susan sighed and leaned on the kitchen counter as they left the driveway in the electric car. Yes, the car ran on electricity from their solar panels, but it couldn’t reach her parent’s house. The range was too short. Who cares about saving the planet if you can’t drive where you want?
“I will just stop here to put the bottles in the recycling bin,” Ron said.
“But Dad, it is 7:50 am, and school starts at 8 am sharp,” Jack said with a frown. “Don’t make me late again, please.”
Ron was already pulling the bottle bags from the baggage compartment. The bins were logically arranged by color: blue plastic bottles, red bottles, and transparent. They were large, 20 feet by 10 feet; the municipality emptied them once weekly. He was down to the last few bottles when he ran into a problem, “Magenta, which bin does it belong to?” The signs on the bin explained that, for the efficiency of the process, one had to put only the correct colors. “This is harder than it looks,” he thought, his brow creasing; time to look it up on the phone. He pulled up the city guidelines on recycling, a manual he knew by heart, and went to the chapter on plastic. He carefully reread the entire chapter, but there was nothing about magenta. He sighed; he was going to have to take the bottle back home and throw it in the regular trash can. He turned around to open the car baggage compartment …
But the car wasn’t there. Ron scratched his head in confusion; where was the car? Where was Jack? It was 8:05. It turned out that Jack had gotten tired of waiting at 7:55, took the initiative, and drove to school. The problem was that he was fifteen and didn’t have a driving license. He did get to school on time but scratched the car when he reversed parked. “That’s a gutsy move,” Susan told Jack with a smile. Then she took Ron aside for a dressing down. He was in the dog house the rest of the week.
A month went by.
Batteries
“Hop on in, Jack,” Ron said.
It was 7:50 am, Ron and Jack were in the car. The bottles and cardboard stacks were in the baggage compartment. They were taking an unusual route to school because of street maintenance. “Oh, did you see that?” Ron said.
“What?”
“That medium size purple bin. It is very rare; I’ve been looking for it for a year. It is the only place you can recycle batteries; I have been driving around with a box of dead batteries all this time. The stack keeps growing. Many people just throw the batteries with the regular trash, but that causes heavy metals to seep into the groundwater. Very dangerous. I have to deal with it right now; the chance won’t come again.
“But why does it have to be now? We’ll be late for school,” Jack said, looking at Ron directly in the eyes and drumming his foot.
“But they rotate the location between the neighborhoods. It will be just a moment, don’t worry.” He parked by the purple bin, took out the battery box, and went to empty it in the dispenser. The box didn’t open. It had a lock, and he didn’t remember the combination he had installed. Hmm, it was 1516, wasn’t it? Let’s try 1776. He took a breath and tried to clear his mind; it was a matter of patience; it would come back. There was a distant tire screech, which he ignored as a distraction. Ah, it is 1618, the golden ratio, of course. He opened the box and emptied the contents into the dispenser. But when he got back to the car — -
It wasn’t there. Where was the car? And more importantly, where was Jack?
It turned out that Jack paid a random adult 20$ to drive him to school. When he got back home, he complained that he had gone hungry because there was no lunch money left. “That’s good initiative,” Susan praised and sent Ron a withering look. Ron had to walk to school to get the car back. He was happy to find that it didn’t have any scratches.
He had to promise Susan never to do it again.
Old Books
“I just leave my empty plastic bottles on the ledge,” Mellisa, the neighbor, said with a smirk.
“I know, Ron can’t resist picking them up,” Susan completed.
“We are trashing the planet anyway, it isn’t like I care, but this saves space in my garbage bin. I am paying for 32-gallon trash can instead of a 64-gallon can,” Melissa added.
This reminded Susan of the half-full bottle of seltzer water that went missing the other day. She found out right when the neighbors came for dinner. It turned out that Ron had emptied it and taken it for recycling.
Ron was looking happy today, which made her suspicious. She looked through the pantry, but everything seemed in order; nothing was obviously missing. This reminded Susan of the old children’s clothes she wanted to give her sister. She went downstairs, breath quickening, but they were still there. She checked around the house, opening the cupboards. Finally, she relaxed on the living room couch, eyes resting on the bookshelves. That’s when she figured it out. She ran downstairs; the basement had shelves of old books. Her heart nearly stopped; the bottom shelf had been cleaned out. “Ron! What happened to the basement books?”
He came down from upstairs. “The books?”
“Yes,” Susan said with a glare.
“Oh, this guy came to the street with his truck and offered to take away old books. Apparently, he has some sweet deal with a papermaking factory; he can recycle them and make a profit. Awesome, isn’t it?” Ron said with a smile. He failed to notice the warning signs. “You would think it would be hard to make money from old books, like drawing water from the desert, but he figured it …”
“Did you notice a small black box on the bottom shelf?”
Ron was caught off guard. “Ahm, no. Why? was it important?”
“It held my grandmother’s ashes. The books were her memories and photographs; from the old days. You better go get them back.”
“It is too late for …”
“Go get them anyway; my grandmother is more important than your planet.”
Late that night, Ron came back on foot, with the box and the books, one armful at a time. He found the guy with the truck, but the car battery gave out a mile from home.
…
Susan’s arms were crossed, and her eyes narrowed. “So, have you learned your lesson?”
“Yes, I promise to never touch that bookshelf again,” Ron said with a faraway look. He was already thinking about all the power cables they weren’t using and which bin they would go into.
