Maggots Are Not Recyclable! - September 15, 2019

With the summer over and more attentive of the routine, I knew something wasn’t right when I found maggots in the recycling bin. Now, as a landlord and self-proclaimed master recycler, I was actually happy to have my own little infrastructure challenge to solve. I have read about recycling, have toured the sort center and have even written about recycling in January of this year (see Dumb and Dirty), so I know that what’s preached isn’t necessarily practiced. Though organic, maggots would be categorized as unrecyclable, as well as anything that’s not basically 95.5% of the material it’s supposed to be and that means it must be pretty darn clean.

So, back to my big solution for my little recycling infrastructure problem: I simply stuck a sign to the bin that reads ‘RECYCLABLES MUST BE CLEAN’. This was a few weeks ago and I am glad to be observing that it is helping, to the extent that most of the contents look sufficiently clean, except for an occasional bag of trash that I tactfully and theatrically relocate to the trash bin. I also realize that my affinity to clean recyclables is much greater than my aversion to the maggots that now only appear in the trash bin.