Recycling, IC style

Having transplanted myself back in the rich soil of the Midwest, I need to meld my west coast possessions with those I kept in my parents’ basement. In other words, I have to throw out some old, useless shit to make room for the newer and currently functional.

From watching “American Pickers” you might get the impression all Midwesterners pile their outdated and broken goods in the backyard. Honestly, it sometimes seems that way in the country. When driving through central Kansas last week, the yards and outbuildings of the farms I passed where so loaded with old cars and machinery I wondered if it was common in those parts for everyone to keep their own junkyard. To the contrary, though, most of us are well-kept and decent, especially us city folk. We properly dispose of our collected detritus, recycling it when possible.

I recycle everything I can. As I clean out my closet (which originally was not a closet; it was more like a corner storage room with shelves), I heap everything in separate piles. Paper, newsprint, magazines, cardboard, that glossy paper/cardboard stuff, plastic, glass, tin. It’s environmentally friendly bureaucracy. Once or twice a day I will dump everything in the appropriate recycling bins in my parents’ garage. There everything will sit until the bins are full and we take them to the curb for pick-up or to one of IC’s recycling centers. Today I took the tin and glass bin to City Carton’s central location on Benton Street.

I also took the AppleWorks 5 User’s Manual there for recycling. Yeah — AppleWorks. The manual was a 250-300 page book I’m confident I no longer need. I stopped using AppleWorks after my G3 crashed in February 200_; I installed the copy of Word ‘98 given to me by a friend after wiping the hard drive.

The AppleWorks manual is indicative of all the weird shit I wonder why I kept all these years. The other day I found envelope after envelope of college pertinent stuff from the time I was accepted at Iowa and attended freshman orientation. There were tons of brochures from banks and student loan companies, all of which, I realize now from the hindsight high ground, were begging me to sell them my financial soul. I think I was always aware of what they were doing (my parents were good business advisors), but I can see now how hard each was trying to lure me. They were little pieces of a national financial crisis in the making. And all of it was on paper. Each application had multicolor carbon copies — one for the borrower, one for the school… — and there were few mentions of ways to apply online. That came years later. On some envelopes it looked like my address had been typed on a typewriter. I can see now that period was much closer to the beginning of a great transition period away from paper and hard copies to electronic. Am I that old?

Though curious and interesting, it was useless shit. So I dumped it all in recycling.

And guess what else I recycled today? My giant Viewsonic monitor and the ancient PowerBook pictured above. I took them to the Iowa City Landfill, where they will be sent, according to the IC government website, to “a DNR-approved recycler” for disposal or recycling.

Though an outdated and 50-pound behemoth, the monitor was still good. However, I don’t need it anymore and was tired of it taking up space in my closet. The PowerBook 150 was something my mom got through the UI about five years ago. (I think her department gave it to her instead of sending it to surplus. Who knows?) She brought it home thinking I could refurbish and use it. “You always wanted a laptop,” she said. That’s true, but I was thinking more along the lines of something made within the last 10 years. (According to Wikipedia, the PowerBook 150 was released in July 1994 and packed an awesome 33 MHz wallop. That’s 1.5 MHz faster than our first computer, a Performa 600CD, bought in September 1993.) It was a worthless dinosaur. I often wonder if old computers and gaming systems will someday be for my generation what cars from the ‘50s and ‘60s are for Boomers; when rare items like the PowerBook 150 will be auctioned for thousands. A lot of us Children of the ‘80s are mad for old 8-bit, original Nintendo shit, and a similar nostalgia seems to be building for the Super Nintendo. (Though, can anyone honestly say the SNES ever went out of style? It was by far the best gaming console ever built.) However, I don’t see something similar happening to computers. Sure, I have a special place in my heart for the Apple IIe’s I first used and learned how to type on in elementary school, but will I buy one just for the hell of it? To show off to my friends? No. So the PowerBook was gotten rid of — properly.

It’s so nice to live in a place where I can recycle. Though Rainbow Disposal in Orange Country promised to sort recyclable material from my trash, I always thought of it as a sort of Wizard of Oz operation. Sure, I became accustomed to “throwing away” the glass, paper, and plastic containers we carefully sort and surely recycle here in IC (at the Casey’s station in Osceola, my mom was shocked when I threw away the glass Coke bottle I bought in Cameron), but I still felt bad about it. Were they really picking everything out? Something told me they weren’t. There is no way a company like Rainbow has its employees open every garbage bag and meticulously sort out the recyclables. It would be way too costly and time consuming. And in SoCal there was no convenient place where I could take my recyclables. The non-redemption recycling situation was worse than redeeming cans and bottles. There was a center on Adams Avenue at Orange Coast College, but as crowded as that place always was it was likely the only recycling center in all of Orange County. How is it possible for a little place like IC, with a population of 65,000, to have better recycling facilities than OC, home to 3 million?

I don’t know, but I’m sure enjoying them.