Local News Tuesday: Gittin’ Trashed in Tuscaloosa

Up until about five months ago, I had never dug in a trash can except when I thought I’d thrown away money. In fact just eight months ago, when I was sitting in my cubicle in Madison, slaving away at the Evil Desk Job and considering my future new life in Tuscaloosa, digging through trash cans never really crossed my mind. Likewise, I can safely say that retrieving someone else’s Mostly-Empty Beer Bottle from the gutter or someone else’s Forgotten Aluminum Soda Can from under a desk didn’t factor in to my plans for hobbies I would pursue once I started my new job as Hip Young College Instructor.

We’ve already mentioned that Tuscaloosa isn’t, perhaps, the best place to live for someone who enjoys saving the planet one #2 plastic bottle at a time, but I never expected the non-recycling mentality of my students and neighbors to so radically change my own actions toward what I’m sure most of the human race considers trash. Take, for instance, the Mostly-Empty Beer Bottle incident from a few months back, which could be viewed by some as the Beginning of my new hobby. It’s December and cold-ish for Alabama (read: low 50’s, high 40’s) and Expat and I are getting out of the car heading to a reading put on my some of my fellow MFA-holding instructors. We’re downtown in the evening. We park in one of the street-parking spaces outside the downtown furniture store. I notice as I step onto the curb that there are 2 out-of-place, empty glass beer bottles kicked onto their sides and resting in the gutter. I start to walk past them and instantly, I have a vision of some city worker reaching down and tossing them into the bag before throwing it onto the trash truck. I shake my head and say to myself “Forget about it.” And then I feel guilty. I mean, if I don’t pick them up, who will?

I sigh. “Hand on a minute, Expat.” I trudge back to the car, pick up the bottles, open the back hatch and stick them inside.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to take these home and rinse them out and we can take them to Birmingham with our glass recycling.”

He looks at me and blinks. “You’re going to start collecting trash?”

“It’s not trash. It’s recycling.”

But folks, let’s face it, trash or recycling, I am nonetheless picking up someone else’s cast offs. Someone else’s waste. I’m touching things that someone else has drunk out of (since most of what I pick up are, indeed, beverage containers of some kind or another). Still, it’s like I can’t not do it. I save my own trash until I can find someplace to recycle it. At any one time I probably have at least one plastic bottle in my backpack, just waiting for me to walk past a plastic recycling bin. At that rate, what’s the big deal about picking up someone else’s? It doesn’t weigh much. No one will know that it’s not mine when I throw it away. There’s only the minor inconvenience of someone Witnessing Potentially Embarrassing Behavior.

I’m of two minds about the Witnessing. On the one hand, I recognize that to most folks, it seems icky and weird to pick up someone else’s trash. On the other hand, when they see me pick it up and watch me carry it to a recycle bin, there is some small part of me that hopes they might be motivated to do the same with the next plastic bottle they come across. Perhaps I’m being idealistic, here, but part of me can’t help but think “Hey, if I can get just one person to consider before they chunk their Diet Coke can in the trash, that’s something, right?”

Of course, if it were simply a question of picking up obvious cast offs and stopping there, that would be one thing. But friends, it doesn’t stop there. Hello, I’m Sparky, and I’m a Trash Can Retrievaholic. It’s true. Everyday when I leave the classrooms where I teach, I pick up the small can by the door and pick through to fish out the recyclables. I usually find 2 or 3 cans and 1 or 2 bottles per day per class. I then take said cans or bottle and carry them across the hall to the recycle bin, which, in most buildings, is less than 10 steps from my classroom. And for the one building I teach in that doesn’t offer recycling? Well, my students know that if they finish off a bottle of water during class, they can hand me the empty bottle at the end of class and I’ll do what I always do: carry it around in my backpack until I find a recycle bin. Could my students do this very same thing themselves? Sure. Would they? Um, no.

Now add to this the fact that right now, this week in Tuscaloosa, all of the city recycling trailers—those ones I wrote about in that other post—are full. This past Sunday, I decided to empty out my garage of the mounds of recycling that I’ve been collecting for the past month, so I did what I always do—I packed the back hatch floor-to-ceiling full of paper, plastic, aluminum, and steel and trundled off to the collection area. Unlike most times I’ve been to drop our recycling at the recycling trailers, this past Sunday, the trailers were completely full. Of everything. People had begun piling their bags and boxes of recyclable goods next to the trailers. Plastic bottles and sheets of newspaper were blowing everywhere.

“Well,” I grumbled, “At least people are recycling . . .”

I decided I’d just hold on to my recycling rather than leave it outside. So I went home. But rather than unload the back hatch, I just left everything there. “I’ll take it to a different site tomorrow,” I told Expat.

I didn’t get to check any of the other drop off locations on Monday, but today I made a point of driving to the location near campus in between my classes. I had it all planned. Walk to the car. Drive to the other drop off point. Unload the car. Park. Walk back to teach. Perfect. Except that my plan B site was just as full, if not fuller than plan A. With plan B, I managed to squeeze all of my magazines and the aluminum cans in (barely), but there was no hope for the plastics, which were taking up the bulk of my trunk. I gave up and drove back to campus, but who knows how many well-intentioned recyclers will be so disheartened that she drives home and just throws it all away? Not only that, but how much of the environment am I saving when I waste heaven knows how much gas tooling around town looking for an empty, or at least not-overflowing, recycling trailer?

So now I really have no choice but to endure Expat calling me “Trash Lady.” I am. I think when you’re carrying other people’s things around in your back pack, it’s one thing. But when you’re trucking them around in your back pack and your car, to the point that you can’t even fit one bag of groceries in the back hatch, well . . . as some of the more refined Southern ladies might say, that’s just tacky.

Somehow, I don’t think this is quite what folks had in mind back when I was in college in Birmingham and my friends used to say they were heading over to Tuscaloosa to get trashed. I don’t think this is what they meant at all.