Today is Blog Action Day, so I’m supposed to write about the environment. Now, I already wrote a Sludgie today so I’m kind of eco’d out. And since Shortcake is usually about my life and things going on in my world and mememememe, I thought I’d talk about the recycling center in my hometown, the Francis Scheidegger Recycling Depository.
I was going to write something about Francis Scheidegger, but I couldn’t find much… just this link from the Missouri Recycling Association, which I didn’t even know existed.
So there you go. Missouri has a recycling association, and you can recycle stuff 24/7 if you live near me. Blog. Action
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I try to recycle. I am addicted to magazines of all sorts, so I like walking to the center with a backpack full of them every month. It’s a good workout. And whenever I eat a TV dinner, I save the cardboard box. I certainly don’t recycle as much as I should, but I’m getting there.
This all started about 6 or 7 years ago, when I was dating a jolly alcoholic*. He really wanted to recycle, so during every party he would force us to rinse out our beer bottles and place them back in the cardboard case.
“Are you really going to recycle these?” I’d ask him daily, peering underneath the bar in his parents’ basement.
“Baby, of course I’m going to recycle them. I’m saving the planet,” he’d say, and then he’d flash that smile that allowed him to get away with everything, including calling me “baby”.
Well, fast forward about 3 months… the bar was basically packed with empty 12-packs and other assorted bottles. Every brand you can think of was present. All beer-making countries were represented. It was a glorious collection, but it had to go. So one day while he was at work, Pammy and I went to his house**. His stepbrother gratefully let us in, and we started packing the bottles into my car.
Here is what we collected:
• 32 6-packs of beer
• 19 12-packs
• 3 grocery bags of cans
• 12 40 oz bottles
Imagine about 450 bottles clinking at the exact same time. Now imagine this noise confined in the space of a 1989 Honda Accord. Now imagine that happening over and over, every single time I hit a bump in the road. Did I mention he lived a half hour away from me?
Also, I was only 20 years old. Pammy was like 18. Can you imagine if I had been pulled over?
To top it all off, we happened to roll into the Francis Scheidegger Recycling Depository during lunch hour on a weekday, which is when all of the local businesses like to drop off their recycling boxes from the copy room at the office.
Pam and I spent almost an hour running back and forth from the car to the bins, yelling for “more green ones” or “more brown ones”. Eventually a crowd of bemused businessmen formed in the parking lot to watch us chuck bottle after bottle into the dumpsters. *** I bet we looked like two cool chicks. When we got to the big box of 40s, they actually cheered.
Since then, I’m always gotten a lot of joy out of the recycling center. Also I try to avoid dating potheads and/or drunks, no matter how adorable they are.
*”Jolly alcoholics” are the alcoholics who never get violent or crash their car or anything… but when you stop and really think about them, you’re like, “Jesus, they sure drink a lot.”
**Ra was supposed to go with me, but this was right around the time that she started dating Ty and she ditched me to hang out with him. This became an ongoing theme in their relationship and it still pisses me off to this day even though they have since married other people.
***They let you throw your own bottles into giant pits of broken glass and it’s seriously fun stuff. I highly recommend it if you’ve never been.
Secretly Stephie 
So is it free to use this facility?