Pages and pages and pages
Last week;s assignment was ‘pages’. While my home is littered with all sorts of books and magazines and pieces of paper everywhere–I always try to think of something not quite so literal as taking a photo of a book. This is the inside of the dumpster that collects newspapers for recycling.
This city has not yet thought about the idea of trash over-taking us or of saving of resources..everything has to be not just cost-effective but income producing. At one time we had blue recycle containers in which we placed all our recycleables to be picked up at the same time as our regular trash. The regular trash was converted from trash cans we bought at local stores to city trash containers that were designed to be automatically picked up by a set of arms that reached out–thus saving the backs of the sanitation department. With the recycleables–they had to bend over to pick up the items and sort them into appropriate bins—not exactly a back-saving endeavor.
Because this was not profitable–the activity ceased–to be replaced by huge dumpsters placed in one central part of the city for those of us who wanted to conserve resources to self deliver and self sort—not particularly hard but does require a bit of time.
Someone decided that perhaps recycling should begin again–but now the recycleables can be placed in a special container bought at a fairly steep price and the cost of picking up the recycle-ables added to the monthly garbage fee. I don’t see many of these containers along the streets.
Too bad they don’t invest in a system that sorts trash as Houston does.
Sylvia Weir Art 