Recycling

I would have imagined that in California, recycling was all the vogue. But it's not, it's very difficult to do. There is a can bank, about the size of a dustbin, about 4 miles from here, next to a car park where it costs $4 to park. Wholefoods market has recycling bins, but that's about 10 miles away, and is colloquially referred to as Whole Pay Check.

However, on lots of containers, one pays a deposit of about 5c, which one can get back by recycling. But not at the shop you bought it from, oh no. I'd have imagined that a deposit so small, for something so large (a 1 gallon container of milk) actually devalues it - if you decide to recycle for the money, it immediately stops being worth doing, a large bin bag full of milk containers is worth about 50 cents. However, the shop has to display the address of somewhere you can take them to recycle, so today I dragged my bin bag of milk containers to the car, went shopping and on the way out, wrote the address of our local recycling centre on my arm. The map lady then showed where it was - surprisingly close - less than a block away (had there not been a shop in the way) and duly directed us to what appeared to be a demolition site. I drove futilely around a couple of times, to make really sure, gave up and went home.

There were signs in the apartment complex about Christmas tree disposal. I thought these might say something about where they could be recycled, but they just said "Don't drop needles in the corridors, and put them in the big bins". You'd have imagined that with 532 dwellings in one relatively confined place, it would be straightforward to collect the Christmas trees, and perhaps shred them and put them on the gardens (so they needed less water), but they don't.