Recycling Day

Every other Tuesday, it's our neighborhood's turn to recycle. You can tell a lot about people by what and how they recycle.

Almost everyone has small, blue open bins for their recycling, so you can see what they're putting out. Every so often there's an over-achiever with a huge, green, covered container. The only thing I know about those people is that they are consuming too much if they still have that much to recycle in just two weeks time. But for everyone else:

• You can tell who reads the Milwaukee Journal Sentinal, and who splurges on the Wall Street Journal.
• You can tell who drinks a lot of beer, and whether they're drinking the cheap stuff from cans or the pricier European micro-brews from bottles. And you can definitely tell the wine drinkers.
• You can tell who orders pizza, from where, and how often (per two weeks).
• You can tell who shops where by the paper bags they've got the rest of their recyclables in. What's most interesting to me about this, is that the prevelance of paper bags from Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and the Outpost (our local co-op) in particular, mean that people aren't using their own cloth bags there.
• You can tell who has kids and how old they are by the diaper boxes and baby food jars.
• You can tell who has cats and what they like to eat. And lastly,
• You can tell who ran to Costco over the weekend by the big boxes of stuff that no one really needs that much of (diced tomatoes, granola bars, copy paper....