The refrigerator deliverymen left behind both a wooden pallet and a pallet-sized square of insulation. I was able to tear the pallet apart with my bare hands (after a fight with Gary), but the insulation was too hard to break apart. It was plastic on one side and foam on the other and I just tossed it in the back of the car.
The recycling center was closed that day, and every other day I thought about it. But this week my car had to be opera-ready, so I went to the recycling center.
I saw bins and conveyor belts for wood, cardboard, cans, and plastic, but oddly, no spot for styrofoam.
I pause here to confess that technically, this really doesn’t qualify as a “This week I learned” entry. Had I actually sought out a recycling center worker and asked, “Hey, WHERE ARE THE BINS WHERE I CAN RECYCLE THIS STYROFOAM” then I would have learned to my shame that recycling centers don’t have bins where one can recycle the one substance that will never break down.
Instead, thankfully, I realized my mistake, and knowing that no recycling ally would harbor a pallet-sized hunk of styrofoam, I snuck out of there before any alarms went off.
And yes, I was able to break it apart using my full body weight and the Mini Cooper and put it in the trash bin.
It will be awful if next week I learn the garbage men don’t accept styrofoam.
2 responses to “TWIL: The limitations of recycling centers”
May I remind you of the revelation I had at Vermilionville near Lafayette, LA – http://www.travelskite.com/2016/07/all-praise-to-mealworm.html
Incredibly, the humble mealworm will happily EAT polystyrene and convert it into soil conditioner. The whole world should be told, so this horrible stuff can be dealt with organically.
Aren’t recycling centres satisfying? I now spurn my household bin and take everything to our Resource Centre to do it all properly (and uncontaminated by lazy sods’ mess).
Big Dot – So many questions. Were they specially trained mealworms, is “soil conditioner” a dainty way to say “mealworm poop” and were they just starving and they took to the styrofoam as a last resort? Because this video
https://youtu.be/0_KljXRXV8E?si=2BzfzIbSv4S3xNQg
suggests they prefer apples to styrofoam. I did think that if they are just average meal worms then Gary might like to do this, but then I read mealworms grow up to be Darkling beetles, also known as …. stinkbugs. And then I stopped reading. They would need to keep the mealworms in a secure location and then sacrifice them before they matured. Stinkbugs are bad news. Worth it to get rid of the styrofoam, but that smell has to be mitigated. Raccons don’t even like to eat them.