From the Magazine: Issue 23


The Green Fiend


Annemarie Conte extreme-recycles for a day, tending to all the urinals and floppy disks people stockpile in their garages


By Annemarie Conte



Photo by Annemarie Conte

I don’t have to extol the virtues of recycling. It’s like buckling up in the car: If you’re not doing it at this point, it’s because you’re ignoring it, not because you’re ignorant. But while I’m glad there are so many people who dutifully sort their stuff every week, it’s time to step it up. Because, really, how hard is it to stack your newspapers in a pile?

That’s why, on a sunny Saturday during a recent trip to Colorado, I worked with the folks at Eco-Cycle (ecocycle.org), a Boulder-based organization on the forefront of the zero-waste movement. Zero waste, if you can’t tell by the name, is all about doing everything possible to keep stuff out of landfills by reducing, reusing, and recycling. Throughout the day I spent with Eco-Cycle, people brought in all kinds of hard-to-recycle items like lawn furniture, toilets, and kids’ plastic toys, which we then sorted for recycling of some kind or another. Consider this your primer on the lifestyle—oh, yes, the lifestyle—that is extreme recycling.

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Issue 25

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