I'll be dipped....

We had two large garbage sacks of pop bottles empty, ready to take in and recycle. I put them outside our front door this morning, and I just looked and they are both gone? I believe that some of the derilicts in the town who ride their bikes up and down the roads searching for empty bottles came and took them.

Although it makes me mad that they would be brazen enough to waltz up to our door and take these bottles, it also makes me sad that they probably needed the bottles to help them survive. We get a nickel back for each one turned in......

How odd that you posted on this subject- we have a local guy who walks up and down the roads on 'recycling day' (when they pick up our blue bags of recyclable stuff) and takes pop cans and bottles out of the bags. He's always wearing tattered clothes and looks like he barely lives hand to mouth

This week I decided to seperate the stuff he can turn in for money so he wouldn't have to hunt through the bag for it. I happened to be on the computer at the time he came by this morning and when he saw what I'd done, he looked up, smiled and waved I feel so incredibly good about doing that one little thing to make it easier for him.

It used to bug me a little to see him looking through our bags, but I've realized that if he needs it that badly, I'm more than happy to give it to him. :rainbow:

In my old neighborhood, we had homeless people do that all the time. It was pretty sad, but they needed the money so we never did anything and just let them take the cans. My brother and sisters and I used to collect cans that we found in the alley or on the street and a few times, we would look in people's recycle bins and take theirs, so we could turn them in for a little spending money. Now that I look back, I should have just left people's recycling bins alone. Oh well, it didn't hurt anybody.

Susieq-thats a good idea about collecting the cans and donating food to the shelter from the money. I think that I might do that from now on.

When hubby and I were dating/engaged we LOVED to drink diet coke. We would go through 3 cases or more a week and we collected all the cans and stacked them on top of each other against a wall and we called it our "diet coke wall". We got the stack pretty high (about 3 rows from the ceiling until one day one of our friends came over and accidently knocked the whole wall down! Needless to say, we never took the time to rebuild the wall (about 400 cans or more.) We gave all the cans to my little sister and she took them into the recycling place and got like $15. Too bad they don't give you much these days for cans, like they used too.

There's this one guy that makes me soo mad! He has a house, he lives just up the street. But, he comes and puts garbage in our Recycling bin, so the Recycling people won't take it...

The part that gets me most is that you live in the middle of nowhere, and these bizarre things keep happening to you. I live with zillions of people all around, and it's business as usual every day.

People in cities learn to ignore each other because otherwise you'd go insane from feeling crowded all the time.

People in the country are so used to being alone that they don't think of how their actions look to other people.

At least, that's my theory . . .

Speaking of recycling, why can't you recycle used phone books? Our recycling day is every Friday, and they say you can't dump them in the cans.

Tigger - I know here in Denver around the time when new phone books come out, dumpsters *magically* appear in a lot of the grocery store parking lots to take old phone books to recycle them. If your area doesn't have these public drop off points, call the company that puts out the books and find out if they do have a recycling program and where you can take them. It does seem like quite a waste to just throw them away.

We have a few people in town who collect cans, in fact one of them is the son of one of my co-workers. He has turrets(Don't think I spelled that right) and cannot have a steady job so he collects cans for money. She laughs and makes fun of him and it seems of kind of mean comming from his own mother. He's a really nice guy though and he's helping clean up the streets.

Then there's the lady who runs around town and carries two bags filled with cans. She runs all the time and all over town, rain or shine. People have offered her rides but she won't take them.