I hear that a long-standing blight in my neighborhood, a bottle-and-can recycling center about three blocks away, is finally (and blissfully) to close in a few months. This is as good of news as I’ve heard in a while. Not that I’m an anti-recycling guy; anything but. I’m careful to separate my trash out and deposit my recyclables in the blue receptacle, regular trash in the black, compostables in the green. That isn’t to identify myself as a rampant do-gooder who goes all postal if some schmuck drops a piece of paper into the regular trash. I just try to be a good citizen, that’s all.
In my neighborhood, the trash/recycling trucks come by early on Tuesday mornings—one truck for the trash and compost, another for the blue-can recyclables. This is a contract, another of the umpty-million such reciprocal arrangements that empower our civil society. We pay the trash company for a service. They, in turn, are not only accountable to us for carrying out their end of the bargain reliably and responsibly, but also act as an employer, paying wages, paying taxes, contributing to various insurance funds, contributing to Social Security, all that. Such is the bedrock of our economy, not to be screwed around with or subverted.
Thus the bottles and cans will be collected and recycled, and by a legal, contracted firm with enchained responsibilities to its employees, its shareholders, its community, and its customers.
But the recycling center throws a nasty curveball into the mix. By encouraging vagrants, druggies, and assorted nogoodniks to “make their living” by rummaging through people’s trash and recycling bins in search of saleable booty, the center is interfering with that oh-so-important social contract. The vampires, as I have taken to calling them due to their late-Monday-night visits to my street, are gaming the system. They aren’t accountable to anybody. They weren’t hired by anybody. Nor do they pay into the system as proper card-carrying members of our civil society. Your basic verminous wino shuffling about behind a stolen grocery cart isn’t one for sitting down with the tax person come February, working out last year’s bottle-and-can income and figuring the corresponding tax liability, if any.
I might be of a different opinion if we had no other recourse to disposing of our trash and recyclables, short of hauling them out to the city dump ourselves. But we’ve already got a system in place, a working agreement with an established company. I resent the way these vampires are piggybacking on other people’s contracted work, uninvited and unhired.
The recycling center is also an urban eyesore, positioned as it is next to a particularly horrid Safeway and directly across the street from a particularly lovely Whole Foods. It smells to high heaven, and provides a magnet for those icky street people who are attracted by San Francisco’s tolerant attitudes and public services. San Francisco wasn’t always a good town to be a worthless bum in, but over the past twenty years the situation has gone past all tolerance.
My part of town has been gentrifying at a full-bore gallop, with expensive new condos springing up hither and yon, houses being renovated, and well-heeled newcomers arriving en masse. This is a mixed blessing, to say the least: prices are going through the roof, for one thing. The neighborhood is becoming increasingly homogenized along upper-middle-class lines. But as an upper-middle-class professional I fit right in, although I certainly do not share the income level of my more recent neighbors. On the whole I welcome the increasingly upscale character of the Castro; it’s a nicer place now than it was.
With the recycling center abolished, we’ll see an end to the Monday Night Vampires. And that’s a good thing—not only for us, but for the entire body politic. If some wino desires to recycle bottles and cans, then may I suggest: fill out an application for employment at Recology, learn to wake up in the morning, show up on time, and carry out a job as a responsible member of society. If you’re not willing to do that, fine and dandy, but keep your grubby mitts off my trash.