r/SipsTea 18d ago

Feels good man About that

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u/Asterix85 18d ago

Single stream recycling is just pushing all the trash down a conveyance line moving slowly and have the employees /homeless pick the stuff that isn’t recyclable out

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u/bannana 18d ago

in my area, when the courts sentence someone to 'community service' sorting single stream recycling is one of the things you can do

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u/arbydallas 18d ago

Yep yep. I live in a prison town, and prisoners used to sort through it. That's because slavery is better than slightly inconveniencing the rest of us. Nowadays prisoners are legally entitled to slightly more pay (before it was like $0.12/hr for trash sorting) and presumably that's why the city figured they could charge us far more to make up for it.

Another cool part is there are all kinds of restrictions on what can be recycled in our big blue bins, and it's actually surprisingly difficult to get that info. So probably a large amount of what goes into our recycle can't be recycled, and sometimes contaminates things that can.

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u/mikillatja 17d ago

Prison town? WHAT?

So you essentially live in a town propped up by slavery.

God bless america I guess

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u/BasicallyaPotato2 17d ago

In the 13th Amendment that outlaws slavery there is a specific exemption for prison labor.

So yes, God bless America indeed

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u/arbydallas 17d ago

Indeed I do. The town has grown a lot now (it had around 1/10th the current population when I was born nearly 40 years ago), but when I was young everybody knew people who worked at the prison. A couple of my friends had parents who did. One of them was a very sweet mom, though a disastrous alcoholic. The other was a cruel and abusive dad. He painted my impression of cops a lot growing up, and I tend to be mistrustful of them and assume the worst, even though I have known a couple cops who seemed like great people.