Well hello there.
This week our class assignment, should we choose to accept this mission, was to go to a place that would have to do with what we blog on. So, since I am blogging on our environment and how to keep it clean and litter free, what better place to go than to a place that pays you to pick up your trash? AKA a recycling center.
TOMRA is the largest recycling company in North America and most likely the world, they are located in 50 countries. You know what else? They even have their own blog, check it out:
http://tomra.wordpress.com/
I mean, this is awesome! A recycling company that has its own blog.! What a recycling freak's, who's blogging on the environment, dream.
Anyway, I take my bottles and cans to TOMRA RePlanet Recycling Centers. They are located throughout the country, but in my neck of the woods, I normally trade at the Brea location on Imperial Hwy in the Albertson's Grocery store parking lot.
It's a beautiful day today, and people are lined up to redeem their glass and plastic bottles and their aluminum cans with the three letters typed in bold on each one, displaying "CRV" which means California Redemption Value.
So, if you've been to one of these places before, then you know the routine. Folks come to the facility and have various plastic trash bags, which BTW is a crack-up being that the focus is NOT to use plastic bags because they are NOT recyclable, but then how else is one to transport their recyclables? OK, I'm up. So there are metal trashcan looking containers that are used to sort the plastic bottles, the glass bottles and the aluminum cans into. I pour the contents of each of my Hefty bags into three separate metal trashcans, then they are put on this solar scale, one after the other, which is actually operated by the sun hitting a solar panel. After the containers are weighed, the attendant proceeds to dump the trashcans containing the recyclables in separate large wood type boxes behind him located within the recycling center and then out pops my receipt from this machine that has kept track of all my weighings, showing me the weight of each type of container I brought in and its total redemption.... $4.83. It seems like I should of gotten way more than that. I had a lot of glass bottles from my Thomas Kemper Pure Cane Sugar Root beer. And glass is heavy too!
Now the self control part...I then proceed to go redeem my cash inside the grocery store, but how strategic is that? I mean, in order for me to get my money, I have to go inside the market to get it, and of course, there is always something I need to buy, like food, so it ends up that I end up spending my redemption money and owing more on my purchase. It's a conspiracy, I tell ya.
Well, looking at some of the RePlanet Recycling Centers, the one by where I live, is majorly outdated. It looks like a mini mobile home that was abandoned by its owners. Sad day. It's really not as up-to-date as the other centers they have. But with the cutbacks and the fund depleted by the governor to help pay off Cali's debt, many of these facilities were cut. (See blog post dated 12/01/09 )
As I leave the market and get into my vehicle, I drive by the recycling center once more and notice the line of people waiting to recycle their containers has now gotten longer since I first got there. It sure is good to see people do their part.. even if they have to get paid to do it. But I look at it this way. Since I usually buy something to eat from the grocery store, recycling bought me a lunch. Not bad for a trade of containers, ey?
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