All Green Recycling

By recycling my old electronics:

I saved46lbs of carbon emissions

From entering the atmosphere!

What's this equal to?

= 8

= 2

= 67

= 307

Powered by All Green Electronics Recycling

I found a place that recycles e-waste right here in the good ol' US for free. There are drop-off locations all over (I used one today) - and coolest is they'll pick your junk up if you want! So no more complaining about what a hassle recycling is, man. Check 'em out.

Orange County Register

Because I'm a sucker for helping high school students in Santa Ana, I agreed to an 8-week subscription to the OC Register, four dailies from Thursday to Sunday each week. Two weeks in, I have 8 newspapers I haven't even removed from their stupid orange bags except the first Sunday copy, the one with the coupons.

Is there one single coupon I'd use in there? Of course not because I'm the turd who doesn't buy into brand labels.

While I'm all about supporting youth and their high school education so they can do their thing and get the basics of education, I'm not sure that my $20 subscription really does anything but provide me with worm food and a huge pile of glossies I feel obligated to haul to the recycling center.

Maybe the kid I am sponsoring with my 20 will devise a way of really making my contribution work. This "let's sell newspaper subscriptions" thing is seriously antiquated.

Phone Book Phenomenon

Once upon a time, but really just a couple days ago, I received a new phone book, the Orange Central Coast Yellowpages.

"But WormWranger PoopHarvester, there are three phone books in the image," you say. I find that baffling too because I stole only one. The third? It's a phone book phenomenon.

But each one came in a yellow bag that looked like this:

If you look carefully, you can see that it says,

"Please recycle your outdated phone books. Recycling information can be found at http://corporate.yellowbook.com/recycling/"

and that is pretty handy for folks who don't have worms or neighbor friends with worms.

A couple days before that, I had received another phone book. The Verizon Superpages.

"But WormWrangler PoopHarvester," you say, "there are two phone books in that image."

Of course there is, I stole that second phone book from my immediate neighbor.

What makes me scratch my head though is how I wound up with three of these phone books (with an ad for a DIVORCE lawyer emblazoned across the spine -- how uplifting). They're those on the bottom of the stack:

The other two were gifted to me by Lori, the neighbor in the next building. I don't steal from her. But I do have her boyfriend's cat. The third phone book? Another phone book phenomenon.

So these three phone books, the superpages, came in bags that say:

"To order directories or to stop delivery of this directory call 1-800-888-8448."

That's cool for folks who have the internet phone book and don't have worms or friends with worms yet.

Two months before this surge of phone books, I found a book of white pages in an orange bag outside when I was walking my neighbor's boyfriend's former cat, not in front of my door like those books above, but just inside the community gate, near my slider. Had I not been the Worm Wrangler, I would've ignored it.

But I picked it up.

And look at what was under the bag:

Go ahead and click the picture to check. It's a real $20!

I could've rushed out and bought

• 20 songs on iTunes (I didn't because I don't have a portable music playing device and use Pandora -- thanks Chuck!), or
• 6.5 gallons of gasoline (of course I bought gas but it was already in the budget), or
• the majority of The Les Halles Cookbook (I didn't because Amazon is unrelenting about selling entire books), or
• a box of golf balls (haven't lost all of the ones from my last box yet)

Instead that 20 sat on my desk here for quite some time. I think that was the Worm Wrangler above, making arrangements for me to score that balance.

The moral of the story? Start a worm bin of your own because then you'll tend to pick up phone books and there might be a $20 phenomenon underneath it.

And now I have a total of 12 phone books. Figure that out.

Really, the book was probably placed on top of the strategically located $20 for the resident drug dealer. But my phone book story is way cooler than that.

Recycling

Mom was ready to go to home, back to MI, Monday afternoon. After spending the morning chilling out and buttoning up her last day in CA, I took her to the airport and saw her off. Thankfully she didn't have TSA up her ass during the security portion. I'd heard about it otherwise as if it was under my control.

After returning home, I carried out my plans to bring recycling to the recycling center, clean out the fridge, feed the worms, literally clean the fridge (the bag of Tony's rice/apples/bananas? leaked), grocery shop and prepare to make something good to eat for the first time in a couple weeks (and then my sink plumbing sprung a helly leak so I wound up making a sandwich).

I brought all of my recycling to Orange Coast College Recycling Center.  I really like that recycling center because it reminds me of those back home in MI as they take DAMN NEAR EVERY FREAKIN' THING you'd generate in a regular household. I'd go into that, but you can just click the link above.

More than that, OCC recycling is open 7 days a week, Sundays being donations only. I usually go Sundays to unload my recycling quickly without having to wait for the people who are interested in collecting their cash.  I have nothing against those people, but I don't have the patience to wait. As there are only 6 spaces for autos to park, it can be a freaking mess with traffic in that tiny lot, particularly if a couple people have month-loads of stuff to collect on.

So what did I bring to recycle?

• Cardboard from pizza and other cardboard boxes like those that I bring Costco goods home in (otherwise they'd roll around in the bed of the truck) as well as excess TP and PT cardboard tubes (1 large cardboard box full because I was too lazy and really didn't have time to chop 'em up)
• paper including junk mail, magazines and other glossies I don't feed worms (two 10-gallon containers!); milk cartons; packing material from doing all of my shopping online (hence the uniform of black T-shirt, blue Levi's and black socks -- for example, black is default for T-shirts and typing "10" for quantity is less time-consuming than selecting specific colors) 
• plastic, can, and glass food containers, including the shitload I take with me when I empty the recycling bins at work, the plastic my Costco TP and PT comes in, plastic grocery bags (fourteen 13-gallon bags total of plastics, cans and glass!)
• metal food containers generated from myself and Spook (1 plastic grocery bag)
• batteries from work and home (2 smallish boxes)

Turns out, if I don't visit the recycling center in 2-3 months, the recycling becomes the equivalent of a near-heaping truck bed-load of stuff that would otherwise go into the dumpster. Now my garage, apartment and truck are completely free of recycling materials. Ahh! *sigh of relief* That crap has been driving me insane.

Recycling is the big reason why I started keeping worms in the first place. Keeping worms has made me much more aware of the materials coming into my apartment and the materials going out. I am shocked by the quantity of waste a single person generates.

I try to do what I can to minimize what goes into a landfill first-hand by feeding worms phone books, paper bags, non-glossy paper/mail, egg cartons and the occasional TP tubes, as well as the garbage from my fridge, but I recognize it's possible for me to make better choices regarding what I purchase. I'd made that realization once a couple years ago, went on autopilot, and am now conscious of it again since I started up this blog.

Thanks for being interested in poop, it'll help me keep my little corner of the world even nicer.