Mad Atoms

Recycling is like avoiding hookers in Vegas. It sounds like the right thing to do, but no one's making it easy for you. If, in 500 years, the planet lies underwater from melted polar ice caps, history books will trace the global disaster back to our inability to provide hassle-free recycling.

Here in LA, the CRV program taxes you five cents on every can or bottle you buy, so you have to recycle just to recoup that money. Great, as if I didn't get far enough in the hole in college; now the environment is putting me in debt. Five cents in profit might not spur me into action, but I'll be damned if the government takes five cents out of my pocket, so off I trudge every week to the fetid cesspool known as the recycling center.

"Center" is probably too lofty a term. It's about the size of a tool shed, with two engorged glory holes equipped with conveyor belts for us to insert our glass and plastic wares.

In an ideal world, the machine would suck up each item and tally the amount owed to us. But, as VH1’s primetime lineup makes abundantly clear, this isn’t a perfect world.

You’re lucky if the conveyor belts work one out of every three trips—which, according to my calculations, is 10% more likely than there being an attendant on duty who speaks English.

If you find a machine that works, you can bet you won’t be the first. Expect to stand in line behind every demographic of human being you usually cross the street to avoid. Invariably you’re stuck behind an 80-year-old homeless man with a shopping cart full of cans who takes half an hour to put one item in the hole.

When it’s finally your turn, odds are: 1) the machine will stop working, 2) it’ll reject every other bottle you insert, or 3) someone will get knifed. I once saw two people almost come to blows over a bottle of Aquafina lying on the ground. I guess it was the principle, not the nickel.