DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

The other project for the weekend was to clean out some of the accumulated junk in the garage. There were a number of cardboard boxes needing attention, as usual, but also a couple old stalled recycling projects to finish off.

Stuffed in one corner was my used-media box:

• 80 CDs and DVDs, either bad burns or obsoleted backups, plus a few old applications
• 37 floppy disks
• a half-dozen 5-1/4 inch floppies, which I guess contained fader-automation settings for the JAR record, because each floppy had a song name on it. They haven’t been touched since 1995 and I have no idea what sort of machine might read them.
• a handful of inkjet cartridges
• a couple toner cartridges

The whole mess went off to GreenDisk. I need to find a local solution, though; UPS hit me for nearly $20 this time. Shipping 15 lbs. of tech trash to Missouri isn’t cheap.

Stuffed in another corner was a box of old shoes. I started collecting them in 2002 when I learned that Nike recycles shoes. I figured most people have a couple of pairs in the back of the closet that are headed either to Goodwill or the landfill. I solicited donations and ended up with about 20 lbs worth. The ones with some life left in them went to charity; the rest just left here for Wilsonville, destined to become a name-brand waste product.

It causes me no small amount of angst that the vast majority of Americans, children of multiple decades of our disposable culture, continue to flood their local landfills with papers, plastics, batteries (and other household toxics), shoes, media, re-usable packing material, etc. So, despite my appreciation for having just reclaimed several cubic feet of storage space, and the karmic relief of crossing a few long-latent projects off the big list, I’m sure I’ll start collecting recyclables again soon.