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A Nerd's Last Word - Recycling Life

Recycling isn’t sexy.

No matter how hard I tried to make it sexy, the supervisors at my local recycling plant just didn’t take well to my saucy strut or my ass-less chaps. To be honest, the council haven’t been trying very hard to sexify recycling and seem to spend most of their time either telling us we’re killing the planet if we don’t recycle or informing us that we mixed our glass in with our plastic and must therefore be assimilated.

The recycling centre is a hotbed of barely supressed rage, testing our affable Britishness to its absolute limit. In theory, it should feed into our undying love for order and tidiness, with everything in its place and a place for everything. But instead this compartmentalised world of card, wood, clothes and shoes (no duvets), serves to frustrate and humiliate in equal measure those who are not accustomed to this microcosmic wing of the global renewables and recyclables movement.

Whenever possible, I prefer to venture into this playground of reusable refuse as little as possible, but since I’ve recently moved house, it’s been an inevitability I’ve been unable to avoid. Judging by the sheer volume of broken furniture, old clothes and general detritus collected over what only really amounts to 1/17th of my lifespan, I can only conclude that I must’ve bought at least one of every single item ever made on planet earth. And if you think I’m exaggerating then… yes, I probably am, a little.

But as someone who is reasonably self-aware when it comes to how much I consume and waste, the past few weeks have felt as if I’ve been single-handedly trying to test the capacity of every landfill site in the country. Indeed, if there were some way in which my castaways were able to be directly compared to an environmental atrocity on a scale from say, casual littering to Chernobyl, I would probably put myself somewhere between the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Kuwait oil fires.

But if one thing these frequent trips to the dump have taught me, it’s that other people who dump things are not only relieving themselves of many metric tonnes of mass produced tat, but also of some kind of emotional burden.

I’ve witnessed arguments about parking, passive-aggressive remarks and been stopped in my tracks by other recyclers who disapproved of my recycling methods. All whilst I get sticky bottle residue on my hands and get gently drizzled on by the English weather, telling myself I’m saving the world. Sure, recycling isn’t going to be sexy, like an ass-less chap, but if we all just get along, maybe we can make it tolerable, like an Ariana Grande song on Vicodin.

Recycling isn’t sexy. No matter how hard I tried to make it sexy, the supervisors at my local recycling plant just didn’t take well to my saucy strut or my ass-less chaps. To be honest, the council haven’t been trying very hard to sexify recycling and seem to spend most of their time either telling us we’re killing the planet if we don’t recycle or informing us that we mixed our glass in with our plastic and must therefore be assimilated.

The recycling centre is a hotbed of barely supressed rage, testing our affable Britishness to its absolute limit. In theory, it should feed into our undying love for order and tidiness, with everything in its place and a place for everything. But instead this compartmentalised world of card, wood, clothes and shoes (no duvets), serves to frustrate and humiliate in equal measure those who are not accustomed to this microcosmic wing of the global renewables and recyclables movement.

Whenever possible, I prefer to venture into this playground of reusable refuse as little as possible, but since I’ve recently moved house, it’s been an inevitability I’ve been unable to avoid. Judging by the sheer volume of broken furniture, old clothes and general detritus collected over what only really amounts to 1/17th of my lifespan, I can only conclude that I must’ve bought at least one of every single item ever made on planet earth. And if you think I’m exaggerating then… yes, I probably am, a little.

But as someone who is reasonably self-aware when it comes to how much I consume and waste, the past few weeks have felt as if I’ve been single-handedly trying to test the capacity of every landfill site in the country. Indeed, if there were some way in which my castaways were able to be directly compared to an environmental atrocity on a scale from say, casual littering to Chernobyl, I would probably put myself somewhere between the Exxon Valdez oil spill and the Kuwait oil fires.

But if one thing these frequent trips to the dump have taught me, it’s that other people who dump things are not only relieving themselves of many metric tonnes of mass produced tat, but also of some kind of emotional burden.

I’ve witnessed arguments about parking, passive-aggressive remarks and been stopped in my tracks by other recyclers who disapproved of my recycling methods. All whilst I get sticky bottle residue on my hands and get gently drizzled on by the English weather, telling myself I’m saving the world. Sure, recycling isn’t going to be sexy, like an ass-less chap, but if we all just get along, maybe we can make it tolerable, like an Ariana Grande song on Vicodin.

  • A Nerd's Last Word - Recycling Life