![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
My disgusting Coke habit
Jan. 9th, 2007 11:30 amI do a lot of Coke. Two hits a day, sometimes three. Also, I spend a lot of time in the "library" (or "den") room of my house. There's books piled everywhere because the shelves haven't been realphabetized in over a year. But I can't clean up the books because there's Coca-Cola® cans covering every available spot. Today I cleaned up the shit:
New Jersey has no return deposits on soft-drink containers. My town does not require that recyclable containers be washed and flattened before they will deign to accept them--but it does have an (unenforced?) ordinance making it a crime to put recyclables in with regular trash. To be nice to the sanitation engineers, I emptied the remaining sugar-syrup (and mould-colonies) from each of the cans and put them in "kitchen trash-can liner" plastic bags. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full! Actually, after I included the 16 cans previously emptied by kid #2 and then left lying around in shoeboxes, there was one can left over plus three bags.
I put the bags at the curb. Before I finished walking up my driveway and back into the garage, a delivery van marked "Deluxe Italian Bakery" stopped at my house and snagged the bags of cans. (They also collected a neighbor's cast-off Christmas lightstrands.) I believe that the van people's behavior is considered a criminal offense because my town depends on sale of recycled cans to help keep its tax-rate low.
Ten minutes later the official recycling truck stopped by and picked up my non-Coke cans+bottles (one paper grocery bag's worth).
The mould-spore levels in the library should now be much reduced. Perhaps my sniffles will settle down a bit.
| Bottles: | |
| 9 | Nestea (free with megapurchase of Coke) |
| 4 | Coke (free with megapurchase of cans) |
| 1 | Rolling Rock |
Cans: | |
| 12 | Dr. Dazzle (Aldi's brand of Dr. Pepper) |
| 227 | Coke |
New Jersey has no return deposits on soft-drink containers. My town does not require that recyclable containers be washed and flattened before they will deign to accept them--but it does have an (unenforced?) ordinance making it a crime to put recyclables in with regular trash. To be nice to the sanitation engineers, I emptied the remaining sugar-syrup (and mould-colonies) from each of the cans and put them in "kitchen trash-can liner" plastic bags. Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full! Actually, after I included the 16 cans previously emptied by kid #2 and then left lying around in shoeboxes, there was one can left over plus three bags.
I put the bags at the curb. Before I finished walking up my driveway and back into the garage, a delivery van marked "Deluxe Italian Bakery" stopped at my house and snagged the bags of cans. (They also collected a neighbor's cast-off Christmas lightstrands.) I believe that the van people's behavior is considered a criminal offense because my town depends on sale of recycled cans to help keep its tax-rate low.
Ten minutes later the official recycling truck stopped by and picked up my non-Coke cans+bottles (one paper grocery bag's worth).
The mould-spore levels in the library should now be much reduced. Perhaps my sniffles will settle down a bit.
