About fifteen years ago I dumped a forty year old old no longer functional Harman Kardon 505 discreet
(( (no chips, no capacitors, no resisters,njnguna nada de eso)) integrated amplifier. IMHO it was the hottest thing until I throttle jockied it one too many times. A very large puff of black smoke and that was the end of that.
Turns out that the availability of spare parts for this 40 year old amp rounds off to zero. Buying a used forty year old HK 505 (rare) on the internet proved very difficult considering the prices were way out of line IMHO.
So I went to an electronics store and listened to their lowest of the low bottom feeder amplifier (was redirected to a bottom of the lowest low bottom feeder receiver and I thought that this no name $109 receiver ran circles around my old HK 505, so I bought the $109 receive and through the HK 505 in the recycle dumpster.
Definitely not the smartest thing I ever did. Probably ended up in a landfill
But once again, I digress.
Getting back to the OP of this thread:
What is the craziest thing that you ever dropped into a recycle dumpster?
Not too long ago, I dropped an overstuffed large kitchen garbage bag full of cross-cut shredder output into a recycle dumpster. How in the world was anyone going to figure out how to recycle cross-cut shredder output?
In 2012, my last turntable committed suicide by jumping to its death from the top of a very tall stack of boxes in the moving van. I blew Taps and heaved it. My LPs are so, so lonely.
I was under the impression that recycled paper was pulped and used to make more paper, so maybe your shredder leavin’s have come back in your junk mail?
By “recycle dumpster” do you mean the containers meant for recycling bulk materials like paper & aluminum, or are you talking about containers for charitable donations of sorta-usable goods intended for resale?
The reason I ask is that it’s insanity to put trash (like your aged H-K amp) into a recycling steam. It was immediately culled out and sent to the same landfill it would have gone to had you dropped it in the garbage dumpster next door. Except at very high cost to the recycling facility vs zero cost had you trashed it instead.
Right now in my city /county/state we’re in a crisis where much of the public loves the idea of recycling, but puts far too much garbage and trash into the recycling stream. Which can’t cost-effectively be filtered out.
So the price of recycling service, which used to be cheaper than trash hauling + landfilling service has become more expensive. And now over half of what gets put into recycling bins is simply taken directly to the same landfill because they can’t afford to do anything else with it.
It’s like the old saying:
Q: What do you call a barrel of sewage with a teaspoon of wine in it? A: Sewage.
Q: What do you call a barrel of wine with a teaspoon of sewage in it? A: Sewage.
Comparatively tiny contamination converts whole truckloads of recyclables into just a truckload of trash.
It certainly doesn’t help that what can be recycled is an ever shifting (nowadays ever-shrinking) list. Which excludes almost all mixed or contaminated materials.
I put old aluminum cookware in a recycling bin.
Loads of magazines.
Once I took a giant box of old tennis shoes to the dump. We don’t have trash pick up. If I can burn it I do. My carbon footprint is huge. Sorry Earth.
You can’t really burn tennis shoes. It’s messy and stinky.
I had 3 kids who wore out 100s of shoes. Not worth giving to charity. Well I saved them in a big box in the garage.
I took the shoestrings out of all of them. Cause, it was the least I could do.
This is how that giant ball of string, on the side of the road, got started. I’m sure of it. My shoestring ball is about a foot across.
Soon I can charge a fee to see my ball’o-string.
Ooh. New goal.
You’d be even richer if you could also advertise the world’s biggest pile of worn out sneakers. Bored tourists taking the slow route on the smaller State numbered highways will always fall for the World’s Biggest {something or other}.
Just to clear the air, in this region of the Sunshine State, the county landfill is about a half mile from our house. It’s just my wife and I and we don’t generate a lot of trash. When I finally figured out a system, I cancelled the trash truck and once a month I take the 2 (sometimes 3) kitchen-sized-bags of garbage over to the LF along with the recycs. There are six compactors: 2 for #1 thru #7 (minus #6) plastic and cardboard and 4 for bagged garbage. There are also large bins for electronics waste, appliances, yard waste, scrap metal and a smaller bin for fluorescent tubes. Glass goes into the garbage; they stopped recycling it several years ago. We use almost no glass for tossing. Ironically, the LF reached capacity some years back and the trash is shipped out to another county.
Thanks to the current administration we no longer have local recycling: everything in the county goes straight to the landfill.
If there was still a local recycling service, the strangest thing would be what I’m throwing away this week: 7 or 8 assorted medi-minders (the little plastic widgets with 7 or 14 or 28 compartments for sorting daily medications into). Ive been using them for 15 years and over the years I’ve upgraded or needed different capacities or whatever. Yesterday I found all my old ones in a box, and there’s no reason to keep them, so… out they’ll go.
