Talking trash
[1] “I do not understand”, said Miguel, scratching his head. “We have just got through figuring out what to put in
the garbage that we were not supposed to before, and now they are telling me it is all wrong.”
Miguel´s perplexity is understandable – he is a maintenance man at a midtown Manhattan residential building.
It has been barely a year since the city of New York declared that it was ending the recycling of plastic and glass.
[5] Prior to the announcement, city residents were supposed to separate plastic and glass from their trash and place
them in two separate blue bags to be picked up once a week for recycling. Then in 2002, New York´s businessman
turned mayor, Michael Bloomberg, declared that even though recycling might be good for the environment, it was bad
for the city´s budget. The cost of sorting, picking up and processing the reusables were much greater than the
benefits, he explained.
[10] But the mayor has an open mind. When contractors offered the city prices that made recycling cheaper, he
accepted. It seems that ending recycling did not actually plug the hole in the city budget, while it did help widen the
hole in the ozone layer. So, from July 1st, the city decided that plastic was to be recycled again. Glass could still be
thrown out, but only until next April, when it too would join the ranks of the recyclable.
So you can imagine Miguel´s perplexity. Four times a day he rides the service elevator from floor to floor,
[15] emptying the blue and green recycling bins where residents dump their metal and newspaper which continued to be
recycled. Some residents, whether out of green convictions or sheer habit, dropped plastic and glass into the bins
too, as they had done until last year.
It was Miguel´s job to separate them from the newspaper and aluminum cans and add them to the garbage.
Now, suddenly, he has been told to preserve the plastic and to junk the glass, but only for nine months more.
[20] “What do they want?” he said desperately. “Next you will need a college degree to be a handy-man in New
York.”
He is not exaggerating. The city is rather strict about the kinds of plastic it is willing to recycle. Bottles and
jugs? Fine. The thin plastic containers in which supermarkets sell blueberries? Maybe. No one really knows. Those
modest little yogurt containers – they are garbage. But how exactly can you tell? Miguel has no idea and neither has
[25] his boss, whose bulletin board still shows last year´s rules.
My advice to Miguel was Gandhian in its simplicity: when in doubt, recycle. But how? The noisy garbage trucks
that wake up the city´s residents at 5:30 a.m. will not be picking up recyclables. The city has announced it will
organize a regular collection twice a month, but those rounds will not start till August. Miguel has been told a recycling
truck will come around each week till then, but he has no idea on what days.
[30] Even the supermarkets are confused. To encourage recycling, they used to charge a five-cent deposit on
every plastic or glass bottle, which they were supposed to refund when you returned the bottle. When the policy was
changed last year, my neighborhood supermarket continued charging the deposits while refusing to accept the empty
bottles back. This was bad news for the homeless, who were the only New Yorkers to actually profit from recycling:
they would wheel in shopping carts full of bottles retrieved from the trash to claim the deposit money they had not
[35] paid themselves. Now the homeless will be back in business again. Provided they wait to try to return glass.
(Speak Up, p. 44-45, June 2004. – Texto adaptado, publicado originalmente na revista Newsweek Inc., 2003.)
É possível afirmar que a frase Provided they wait to try to return glass. (linha 35) encerra, em relação à frase anterior, uma idéia de
