Recycling Frustration

On the morning of January 1st 2005 I looked around at all of the empty beer bottles left over from the night of New Year's Eve festivities with Marci's in-laws and decided that I just didn't want to throw them away. It seem like such a waste to put that much recyclable glass into the trash. So, I decided to start collecting recyclables with the eventual plan of actually recycling them.

Shortly after that I called up the Spanish Fork city manager and inquired whether or not Spanish Fork had a recycling program. I was and still am almost embarassed to live in a city without a recycling program. When I lived in Wisconsin recycling was just part of your regular trash pickup. I was pleased to discover that Spanish Fork was renegotiating it's waste management contract and were hoping to include recycling services in the new contract. Unfortunately, this was going to take about six months.

I decided not to be discouraged, and I just started accumulating trash bags of glass, plastic and aluminum in my garage. Six months came and went and although there was some mention about the possibility of a recycling plan in one of my monthly utility bills nothing ever came of it.

It has now been a year and a half since I first started collecting recyclable garbage in my garage. I probably have a dozen trash bags filled with various glass, plastic and aluminum containers. I want very much to get rid of them out of my garage. This morning I decided that I'd had enough and went on a quest to find a place to dispose of my recyclables. This proved to be a much more difficult task than I could have imagined.

It was trivial to find a place that would recycle aluminum but very difficult to find places to take the plastic or glass. There were a couple of places in Salt Lake that sounded promising but none of them were open on Saturdays. Damnit! In the course of my googling I discovered that Provo actually has a curbside recycling service. I dug a little further and found out that Provo also has a place to drop off recyclables at their yard waste processing station just down the street from Novell.

So, I loaded my car with all of my garbage and headed off to Provo. When I pulled into the site, it wasn't obvious where the recycling drop off was. I spoke to the redneck attendant and asked him to point me in the right direction. He replied, "Well we do have that big blue thing over there, but I don't really know what it's for. I don't give a shit what you put in there." It turns out that big blue thing was meant only for recycling computer paper.

Can it really be that difficult to recycle glass and plastic in Utah County? In deperation I drove around Provo hoping to stumble across some big recycling dumpster that I knew didn't really exist. I drove past the Provo city offices, I drove past BYU, I drove past the Springville yard waste recycling center and then I finally drove past the Spanish Fork city offices before finally admitting defeat.

I was awfully tempted to just drive by a dumpster and unload my garbage into the trash. Was it really worth all of this trouble to recycle? The thought of unloading those bags of garbage back into my garage was killing me. In the end I decided to stick it out just a little longer. I couldn't stomach the thought of holding on to all this stuff for a year and a half only to end up throwing it away in a regular dumpster. Monday I'll call around in Salt Lake and find a place to recycle my garbage. I'll also be calling Spanish Fork city to harass them about not following through on their recycling plans.