I can’t believe what a boring bastard of a thought this is.
It is at the time I am writing this, quite late. It’s late not just in the time of night, but also late in the cycle that our house runs on. There’s basically a fortnightly track, and it all orients around the single event of our recycling being done.
We don’t generate much in the way of typical garbage. Most of our waste in this house is paper and plastic, and since we do that, we buy recycleable whenever we can. In our area, in order to encourage recycling, the non-recycleable waste bin is half the size of the recycling bin, which, you know what, whatever.
If you just organically throw things into the recycling as they need it, though, they pack up and fill a lot of space. When things are being delivered in hard cardboard boxes, if you just stick those boxes in, their basic shape exerts force around them. When people give you paper bags instead of plastic ones, and you just ball them up and throw them away like that, they’ll occupy a lot more space than they would otherwise.
This space is at a premium then.
Fox and I basically have to plan throwing out our recycling.
And what’s more, she’s really good at it.
A box has all these points of stress, it creates empty space and it resists being pressured out of that shape. That’s kind of the point of a box. Same is true of plastic containers, though they often deform a little less easily. This means that the most efficient way to put a box in the recycling is to break it down into panels. Larger boxes get cut into matching shapes, then get stacked at the bottom, then soft paper atop that, then crushed plastic and cans, then anything that’s last minute atop it.
The most amazing thing about this is this means that my living room table, where I would normally sit or set up board games, is, amazingly, given over to the task to organising the recycling as we approach the fortnight end, when it will get taken out and go elsewhere. I am trying to make sure that the food I eat now is the stuff from recycleable containers so we don’t have two jars of the same thing in the fridge or cupboard, don’t have doubles of a type of can.
It is an enormous amount of work, and constant mental effort, dedicated to just making sure I don’t have to sheepishly ask our neighbour if I can put some boxes in their recycling (because they’re managing theirs too).
I write about this not because you should feel sorry for me, or even care that much. I’m writing about it to reflect on how something so mundane as ‘chucking things in the recycling’ is now consuming material space and effort to be done in a manageable way in this time of heighened awareness.