{"id":377,"date":"2005-09-12T09:54:16","date_gmt":"2005-09-12T17:54:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/wordpress\/archives\/2005\/09\/when_it_doubt_use_it_as_a_cooler.html"},"modified":"2005-09-12T09:54:16","modified_gmt":"2005-09-12T17:54:16","slug":"when_it_doubt_u","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/09\/when_it_doubt_u.html","title":{"rendered":"When It Doubt, Use It As A Cooler"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Times profiles those jack-booted thugs who pick through your trash to determine whether you’re recycling correctly<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

A middle-aged woman wearing nothing but a bath towel stumbled to the door and opened it.<\/p>\n

“Shoes are not recyclable,” Sergeant Pascall informed her.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The City collects $250,000 a year this way. But we digress:<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“My antennae are going up,” she said. “It’s recycling day and they don’t have anything out.”<\/p>\n

She untied the black bag and found water jugs mixed with plastic hangars, a dirty aluminum tray and a bag of household garbage.<\/p>\n

Another summons.<\/p>\n

As the morning wore on, some residents stood alongside their recycling like students at a science fair waiting to be judged.<\/p>\n

“This is a good effort,” Sergeant Pascall told Phillip Simpson, who towered over her.<\/p>\n

“Thank you, ma’am,” Mr. Simpson said.<\/p>\n

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.”<\/p>\n

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.)<\/p>\n

But sometimes the rules are too elusive even for her.<\/p>\n

“What about this?” Mr. Garcia asked, holding up a bag of old cooking pots.<\/p>\n

“Garbage,” she said.<\/p>\n

“I thought any metal at all could go,” Mr. Garcia said, shaking his head.<\/p>\n

He was right. The Sanitation Department chart says that old pots can be recycled.<\/p>\n

But any confusion over metal is nothing compared with the misinformation about plastic. Sergeant Pascall finds unacceptable plastic in almost every bag.<\/p>\n

“We don’t recycle Kitty Litter boxes,” she said as she poked through Felicita Jurado’s neatly bagged recycling.<\/p>\n

“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.”<\/p>\n

“You have to look at the pictures,” Sergeant Pascall said, referring to the city’s recycling decal, which indeed does not picture cat litter.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

“It’s damned if you do and damned if you don’t,” he said, commiserating.<\/p>\n

Then, pointing to the cat litter box, he asked Mrs. Jurado, “Are you going to use that?”<\/p>\n

She said no and he took it happily, planning to recycle it in an old-fashioned, unofficial way dictated by necessity, not law.<\/p>\n

“I’ll use it as a cooler,” he said.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Times profiles those jack-booted thugs who pick through your trash to determine whether you’re recycling correctly: 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-grrr"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/377\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bridgeandtunnelclub.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}