Recycling

Recycling is a great idea, but lately I've been noticing a lot of problems when trying to put the theory into practice.

Things that make you go hmmm #1: I was at the Whole Foods in Cupertino a couple weekends ago and was throwing out some trash after lunch and was happy to see that they had trash separation for both regular garbage, compost, and glass/plastics. Shortly after I threw out our refuse from lunch however, an employee came by and collected the garbage from these separate cans and just threw them all into one large cart. The separated trash wasn't bagged, it was just mixed together in the big cart. Seriously, what's the point of even having separate containers if you're just going to mix them up anyway other than to fool customers into thinking that you care?

Things that make you go hmmm #2: I'm at a conference at the Moscone Center in SF right now and they have water coolers scattered around instead of bottled water, which seems like a good idea. But then right next to some of these water coolers, they also have garbage cans marked "compost". Of course, no one else seems to care and just throw out their plastic cups into these garbage cans. While you can accuse these people for not paying attention, I think more blame goes to the organizers for not having the right trash cans in the right locations, because they do have plastic recycling receptacles as well.