It’s not easy to recycle in Quincy, Massachusetts. Not a lot of people do it as a matter of fact. One day I saw one of those blue recycling bins on the street during trash pick-up and I wondered how you could get those. They weren’t outside my apartment when I moved in like I had been accustomed to. And the day I actually saw one of those blue bins was on a side street about 3 months after I moved in. I had assumed there was no recycling in Quincy and I had been heated about it. My buddy who had lived in Quincy for a few years prior had noted he didn’t recycle in Quincy and another friend I knew confirmed that fact. I hadn’t taken the 2 minutes to look on the internet to check but everywhere else I had lived had been way more up front about recycling. Those blue bins were all over the place, and everyone had seemed to use them.

One night at a bar I was on one of my rants about how there was virtually no recycling in Quincy, and how I had seen that someone had a blue bin that they probably had brought in from another town, when the woman I was talking to stopped me and told me there was a recycling system in town. I was shocked. She told me that I had to go to the Town Hall to sort it out but that it exists. I promptly went on the internet and found the necessary information. It was amazing that I had to do work and request to recycle in Quincy but I was into it and determined to make it happen. It would be a new source of pride for me. I lived in Quincy, MA and I chose to take it deep and actually recycle. I would be the MAN! Women would be attracted to how green I was. This was going to get me laid and be good for my conscience. I was all in.

I promptly went to the Quincy Town Hall and acquired the necessary materials to recycle. The woman at the Town Hall gave me four recycling stickers to put on a recycling bin that I had to provide. I told her I only needed 2 stickers but she insisted they were “very cheaply made” so I should have some reserves. Recycling bins had to be 32 gallons or less and the town of Quincy worked with local hardware stores to give you a $5 discount for any bin you had to purchase in order to recycle. This was kind of irritating because most towns provided you with the bins. Not so in Quincy. You actually had to pay (buy a bin) to recycle. In order to get the $5 discount you had to acquire a coupon from the Town Hall, which the woman gave me. When I asked her for another one because my house had 2 floors and several tenants, she told me there was a limit to one discount per person. I immediately asked her if my friend Marty, who was with me haphazardly, could get one and she gave him one with no questions asked. He didn’t even live in Quincy, and I’m sure she didn’t care too much.

After getting my bin set-up in my apartment and informing my roommates we could now recycle, things started magically falling into place. After one week there was actually more recycling than trash and it made me well up with pride seeing the sight of this. Even my landlord, who stopped by randomly that week, commented that he really liked the recycling idea. He was also under the impression that there was no recycling in Quincy and was pleasantly surprised by my efforts to keep Quincy green.

So trash day was Thursday. I excitedly took out the trash, and my new recycling bin on Wednesday night and it was like Christmas Eve. “The recycling man is coming tomorrow!” I told my roommate Steve. “Oh cool,” he said, not very interested in my comment. Apparently not everyone is that hyped to recycle, but his unenthusiastic response did not deter my excitement. I went to bed on Wednesday night dreaming of sugar plums and fairies dancing through glorious fields of gold.

I was awoken on Thursday morning by some rummaging around outside of my apartment at about 7:30 AM. I was on the first floor in a room at the very front of the house and two of my 6 windows (yeah the small room actually had 6 windows!) were open to get a breeze going in the room. I pulled up the blinds and took a look outside to see what was going on. It was a little Asian man taking the bottles and cans out of our recycling bin, in order to return them for a refund. I have seen this before in other places I have lived so I was not surprised about the fact he was taking the bottles. What did surprise me was that he was digging into the bin and taking out the non-refundable stuff and putting them either on the street to the left of the recycling bin or in the trash bin to the right of the recycling bin. So the immediate question became: is he going to move that stuff back from the trash bin into the recycling bin after he is done?! I was immediately wide awake. He wouldn’t! He wouldn’t dream of not putting my recycling back! I watched him finish up and then put the stuff on the street back in the recycling bin. And…Then…Just moved on to the next house. I was in shock. No he just didn’t! I immediately turned into Recycling Nazi Boy, got up, and went outside to rectify the situation.

I moved back the recycling that had been put into the trash bin (which was barely anything to be honest) and debated whether to say something to the little Asian bottle collector man. After about .2 seconds of deliberation I decided it was the principle of the whole thing that bothered me and I should say something if the opportunity should ever arise. As chance would have it, at that exact moment he had just finished filling up a green bag with his refundable recyclables and started to walk right by me to get another green bag from his stash of bags. He made eye contact with me and showed a big warm smile and said very nicely and politely, “hello”. I was not in the mood for this man’s kindness and I responded with, “Come on man, you gotta put the stuff back in the recycling bin!”. He nodded even more politely as if he understood and walked right by and continued his business.

I went back into my house and lay back down in my bed. And it was only then did I realize how ridiculous I must have looked to this man. First, I’m pretty sure he did not understand what I said, as many Asians in the Quincy area were really fuzzy with their English, especially when a person speaks quickly, and especially when they just woke up and its only 7:30 in the morning and they are a bit hazy. Second, I realized that in my haste I had just gone outside on a busy street, right across from a decently high end nursing home, in just my boxer shorts. It was summer time but still, it must have been quite the sight for this man to see a groggy 30 year old dude in just his boxers moving 2 newspapers and 2 Vita Cocos back into a recycling bin on the sidewalk of Franklin St. (In addition to this fact, a week later I found out that the Vita Coco drinking pouches may not even be recyclable). I immediately started to laugh at myself, did I really just go out and act like that half naked and in a mini recycling rage? I was a recycling pioneer turned into a recycling loony.

Moral of the story is: Don’t mess with a man’s recycling, it will bring out all sorts of crazy. Even from the most relaxed men of our generation.