Disillusioned. Again.

It wasn't enough to find out the Easter Bunny, Santa Clause, and the Tooth Fairy weren't real. That's kind of a rite of passage, right? Although one can make a case that the Tooth Fairy is real, it just works backwards: every tooth we lose means our dentist gets a bundle. Not sure about the pillow part, since I'm not that well acquainted with my dentist.  Totally by choice, folks. Totally.

But today I heard something that shattered my illusions in a very adult way. It concerns recycling.

Our club has a lot of records to keep, and we're required to keep them for 3 years. Since that's about all the room we have in our filing cabinets, they get purged about every year going back just past that 3rd year. It's a lot of paper. We had two full paper boxes of old files cluttering up an already cluttered office. They had to go. 

When we empty club boxes, such as the ones our supplies get delivered in, the procedure is to set the empty ones outside our doors and the cleanup crew will dispose of them overnight. We're told they go to recycling. We're good little citizens, you know, and are proud of our efforts. When we have plastics or glass to get rid of, there is a recycling bin near the rec center's front desk which takes them. So the advice I got was to take the two full boxes of old files and set them on a rolling cart to go down there for that.

Well, turns out, not so much.

We know our cleaning/facility crew by first names, Winston and Mike. Their office is across the hall from the club, and they often pop in just to say hi. We know where to go with any relevant problem. So when I got down to the front desk with two full boxes of paper files, they said our boxes did not in fact go there. Instead they go out to the dumpster in back. You know, where ALL the garbage goes. Where ALL our "recycling" has always gone. They just haven't told us. While they called Winston to take it out, I suggested I could just take it home and put it with our home recycling. Good citizen, right?

There was no need, I am informed. Whether it's garbage or recycling, community wide, it all goes to the landfill. Every scrap. Since our garbage/recycling company is the same one area wide, I concluded it's what happens to all our stuff we send out, however we sort it or don't. The company's problem is that people just don't sort it out, not to the standards needed for actual recycling. People don't clean out cans, remove tape and staples from paper or cardboard, withhold paper with food and grease on it, remove those metal jar lids with the glued in rubber ring. In short, we don't actually recycle, because the recycling company doesn't choose to sort to make up for our errors. It all goes into the same landfill.

We just THINK we're good citizens.

It might be time to see what actually happens in your community.

Next thing you know, somebody's going to start claiming elections aren't really accurate either.

Oh wait....