Black plastic plant pots hard to recycle :(

Just editorial: maybe we should go back to calling dumps dumps?

One take-away from what I’m hearing here, about the high proportion of recyclables that are ultimately dump-bound: the “reduce” portion of reduce/reuse/recycle is by far the best.

 

Speaking of dumps, when I was a kid, in my small town:

The dump, at least in the early days, was a gate in the chainlink fence, beyond which was a chute/flume thing going down the near-vertical slope to the river, downstream of the hydroelectic dam (maybe 1/2 mile upstream of the ocean). Garbage truck would back up to it and let it rip. I'm not sure if some common sense prevailed; I would think broken appliances and other large items went elsewhere, but not sure.

This was in my early years, and I honest-to-god thought more recently, I might have dreamt it up. But we were up there one time, looking at a mural-sized photo of the below-the-dam area, and there was that gate and flume. I did read some online discussion on it, and one comment was that the garbage was mostly just paper in those days, relatively benign, biodegradable.

Also, the used oil disposal system, behind the nearby gas station, was a rock bank out back...