Miguel’s perplexity is understandable–he’s an all-purpose maintenance man at a midtown-Manhattan residential building. It’s been barely a year since the City of New York declared that it was ending the recycling of plastic and glass. Prior to the announcement, city residents were supposed to carefully winnow out plastic and glass from their trash and place them in separate blue bags to be picked up once a week for recycling. Then in 2002, New York’s businessman turned mayor, Michael Bloomberg, declared that even though recycling might be good for the environment, it was bad for the city’s budget. The costs of sorting, picking up and processing the reusables were much greater than the benefits, he explained.
You’ve got to hand it to Hizzoner: he has an open mind. When contractors offered the city rates that made recycling cheaper, the mayor bit. It turns out that ending recycling didn’t actually plug the hole in the budget, while it did help widen the hole in the ozone. So as of July 1, the city decided that plastic was to be recycled again. Glass could still be tossed out, but only until next April, when it too will join the ranks of the recyclable.
So you can imagine Miguel’s befuddlement. Four times a day he rides the service elevator from floor to floor, emptying the blue and green recycling bins where residents dump their metal and newspapers (which continued to be recycled). Many residents, whether out of green convictions or sheer habit, dropped plastic and glass into the bins too, as they had until last year. It was Miguel’s job to separate them from the newspapers and aluminum cans and add them to the garbage. Now, suddenly, he’s been told to preserve the plastic. And to junk the glass, but only for nine months more. “What do they want?” he mused mournfully. “Next, you’ll need a college degree to be a handyman in New York.”
He’s not exaggerating. The city is rather finicky about the kinds of plastic it’s willing to recycle. Bottles and jugs? Fine. The thin plastic containers in which supermarkets sell blueberries? Maybe. (No one really knows.) Those modest little yogurt containers? Fuggedaboutit–they’re garbage. But how exactly can you tell? Miguel hasn’t a clue, and neither does his super, whose bulletin boards still show last year’s rules. My advice to Miguel was Gandhian in its simplicity: when in doubt, recycle.
But how? The daily garbage trucks that wake up the city’s residents with their clatter and bang at 5:30 a.m. will not be picking up recyclables. The city has announced it will organize a regular collection twice a month, but those rounds won’t start till August. Miguel’s been told a recycling truck will come around each week till then, but he has no idea on what days. Even the supermarkets are confused. To encourage recycling, they used to charge a five-cent deposit on every plastic or glass bottle, which they were supposed to refund when you returned the bottle. When the policy was changed last year, my neighborhood supermarket cheerfully continued to charge the deposits while refusing to accept the empty bottles back. This shortchanged the homeless, who were the only New Yorkers unabashed enough to actually profit from recycling: they would wheel in shopping-carts full of bottles retrieved from the trash to claim the deposit money they hadn’t paid themselves. Thanks to Hizzoner, the homeless will be back in business again.
Provided they wait to try to return glass.
