When It Doubt, Use It As A Cooler
It was not yet sunrise in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, when Sgt. Christine Pascall pounded on the darkened front door of the three-story house on 47th Street.
A middle-aged woman wearing nothing but a bath towel stumbled to the door and opened it.
“Shoes are not recyclable,” Sergeant Pascall informed her.
The woman’s puzzlement quickly turned to annoyance as the sergeant, a member of the Department of Sanitation’s enforcement division, explained that she had found other unacceptable items in the blue recycling bag: Chinese food containers with rancid stripes of fried rice, and plastic foam meat trays and egg cartons.
The woman, who spoke little English, abruptly closed the door, refusing to reopen it. Sergeant Pascall finished writing a summons for mixing garbage with recycling, an environmental offense in a city where nearly all household trash has to be exported out of state at great expense. Then she taped a pink carbon copy of the $25 summons to the homeowner’s door.
The City collects $250,000 a year this way. But we digress:
Posted: September 12th, 2005 | Filed under: Grrr!After a year on the recycling beat, Sergeant Pascall has developed a keen eye, and when she sees a multifamily house with just one black plastic bag on the curb, she stops.
“My antennae are going up,” she said. “It’s recycling day and they don’t have anything out.”
She untied the black bag and found water jugs mixed with plastic hangars, a dirty aluminum tray and a bag of household garbage.
Another summons.
As the morning wore on, some residents stood alongside their recycling like students at a science fair waiting to be judged.
“This is a good effort,” Sergeant Pascall told Phillip Simpson, who towered over her.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Mr. Simpson said.
When she got to John Garcia’s house, though, he was scowling. “They give out tickets even though they are constantly changing the rules,” he said. “That’s a real pain.”
The sergeant inspected his recycling, rejecting metal salad tongs and a lasagna pan still specked with food. (No tongs, and the pan can be recycled only if clean.)
But sometimes the rules are too elusive even for her.
“What about this?” Mr. Garcia asked, holding up a bag of old cooking pots.
“Garbage,” she said.
“I thought any metal at all could go,” Mr. Garcia said, shaking his head.
He was right. The Sanitation Department chart says that old pots can be recycled.
But any confusion over metal is nothing compared with the misinformation about plastic. Sergeant Pascall finds unacceptable plastic in almost every bag.
“We don’t recycle Kitty Litter boxes,” she said as she poked through Felicita Jurado’s neatly bagged recycling.
“But this is plastic,” said Mrs. Jurado, wrapped in a flowered house coat and pink flowered sandals. “They say plastic recycles, so I put it in the plastics.”
“You have to look at the pictures,” Sergeant Pascall said, referring to the city’s recycling decal, which indeed does not picture cat litter.
Flustered, Mrs. Jurado removed a plastic bin the size of a picnic basket that had once held several pounds of cat litter. As she did so, John Tracey, a neighbor, walked by.
“It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” he said, commiserating.
Then, pointing to the cat litter box, he asked Mrs. Jurado, “Are you going to use that?”
She said no and he took it happily, planning to recycle it in an old-fashioned, unofficial way dictated by necessity, not law.
“I’ll use it as a cooler,” he said.
