One day back in the ‘90s, while working for a former employer, I went to a printer’s shop to run an errand. In a little cardboard display stand on his desk were a bunch of brochures about recycling in Los Angeles. I picked one up and put it in my shirt pocket.

The printer laughed. “Those have been there for three years and you’re the first person who’s ever taken one.”

Los Angeles may be the place where new age ideas are born, but we’re hardly at the forefront of the recycling movement. We were far from enacting the first curbside recycling program. That honor goes to University City, Missouri, in 1974. We didn’t get around to it for another 15 years, when the state assembly passed a bill requiring jurisdictions throughout California to divert some of their trash from landfills or face financial penalties. The idea was to make people aware of the state’s growing garbage stream and shrinking landfill capacity. Gee, if the state assembly said so, then it must have been true.

Hence, in Los Angeles, curbside recycling became a function of the Bureau of Sanitation. All homeowners were given small yellow bins, which were just big enough to hold a foot-tall stack of newspapers. They quickly proved inadequate, and were replaced with 90-gallon (trash-can-sized) bins. The blue one is for paper, plastic, and aluminum--and lots of other stuff, I would find out. The green one is for yard waste. (It is worth mentioning that the bins in the city of Beverly Hills are large to the point of freakish. Either everyone there just likes large things, or rich people generate more crap.)

The story is different for apartments. Apartment owners hire private trash collection services for the emptying of dumpsters. These companies have no incentive to subsidize separate collection for recyclable materials. For those of us who live in apartments, recycling is not usually a simple task.

Somewhere along the way, I decided I didn’t like the idea of throwing away recyclable materials. Without the benefit of being an expert on the subject, reducing our garbage flow and increasing our landfill capacity just seem like good ideas to me. Or maybe I’m one of those people, as Penn & Teller surmised in their TV show Bullshit!, who recycles because it feels good. Except that it doesn’t feel good to me. I’ve gone from being pleased that I’m helping the environment to being neurotic about not throwing away recyclable materials. Every scrap of paper ends up in my bag full of scrap papers and junk mail. I rinse out my spaghetti sauce jars, let them dry, and put them in bags in my kitchen, where I keep my beer bottles, wine bottles, plastic soda bottles, rinsed-out soup cans, and collapsed cereal boxes. I stack my newspapers in a corner until there are enough of them to fill a grocery bag. The result is a bunch of bags of crap filling up my apartment because it is a pain in the ass to recycle them.

I schlep them to my car and put them in my trunk--and backseat--where they might stay for days because an opportunity to recycle them doesn’t present itself. I could dump them in a blue recycling bin that I see on the street, but this becomes problematic. First of all, these bins are not out on the street all the time, just the one day a week that the recycling trucks come by. Even if I do see them on the street, there is the issue of parking. With everyone putting their trash, yard waste, and recycling bins out at the same time, a lot of curb space is taken up. Unless I’m on a street that isn’t near any apartments or businesses, there may not be a parking space, which would force me to stop in the middle of the street and risk blocking traffic. Blocking traffic is the worst thing any human being can do to his fellow man in Los Angeles. It is worse than homicide.

Even if I can let go of my ethos long enough to block traffic, I don’t want to get caught filling someone else’s bins with my crap. I’m always afraid that they might see me and get mad. They may need all sixty gallons of space every week. Plus, I hear it’s illegal to tamper with other people’s bins, even if you are trying to reduce the state’s garbage stream.

Fortunately, there is a Whole Foods Market conveniently located near me. For those of you not familiar with Whole Foods Market, it is a store that sells hormone-free milk, free-range chicken, shade-grown coffee, and other healthy, environmentally conscious things that require hyphens. A typical store has an entire aisle devoted to homeopathic, ayurvedic, and herbal supplements, with experts on hand to help you figure out just how much bee pollen you need or which kind of flaxseed oil is right for you. They could even tell you what the hell “ayurvedic” means.

The store near me is so progressive about the environment that it has a giant recycling bin in the corner of its parking lot--that it provides and empties at its own cost, I found out recently. This is where I take my recyclables. On occasion. Whole Foods Market is such a popular place that parking there is about as easy as flossing one’s teeth with a pencil.

The last time I went, I fought to get into the driveway, squeezed between two SUVs to get into a parking spot, and handed off my bags of stuff to the nice scavenger lady who frequents the bin. There is no shortage of people in Los Angeles who go around collecting cans and cardboard. Then I moseyed over to the smaller bins to dump my mixed paper, whereupon a volunteer with a clipboard came at me. She wanted to hit me up for something on behalf of the Democratic Party. Money, signatures, courage not to fuck up another election--I don’t know what. I was in no mood to listen. Recycling bags of crap really shouldn’t be this difficult.

I wanted to find out more about the city’s recycling program, namely how I can recycle bags of crap more easily. Can I dump stuff in blue bins that don’t belong to me? They had no such information on the site. What I found out, though, blew my little mind. Our city recycles an awful lot of crap, over 240,000 tons of it: wrapping paper, arts and craft paper, telephone books, note cards, blueprints, file folders, Post-it notes, catalogs, window envelopes, shoeboxes, detergent boxes, the cardboard thingies inside rolls of toilet paper and paper towels, corrugated boxes, pie tins, aluminum foil, paint cans, aerosol cans, wire hangers, bi-metal cans (Can metal cans be bi?), broken bottles, margarine tubs, yogurt containers, plastic planters, dishwashing liquid bottles, and dry cleaner bags. And that’s only about half the list.

Just to make me more neurotic, there are lots of things one can’t recycle: soiled papers, bags with oils and food waste, broken glass, plastic trays from frozen dinners, plastic six-pack rings, plastic hangers, plastic toys, electrical cords, cloth, styrofoam, appliances, mini blinds, kitchen utensils, lawn furniture, and wood. And that’s only about half the list.

And there is another list of things for which the city provides special pick-up services and drop-off locations: extra yard trimmings, bulky items, Christmas trees, dead animals, used tires, concrete, asphalt, bricks, gypsum, wallboard, plate glass, scrap metal, and hazardous materials. And crap. Horse crap. In fact, they give you a special bin just for horse crap, and the city will empty it for ten bucks a month. To put this in perspective, a single ticket for a front row seat at a Los Angeles Kings game costs $424.50.

I also found out that restaurants can donate extra food, and participate in a program to recycle grease and cooking oil. And fat. Fat can be recycled! It can be used to make soap products and animal feed. It’s in your business telephone directory under “Rendering,” FYI.

But I could find no link for a page for people who live in apartments and don’t want to negotiate the parking lot at Whole Foods Market. I called the Bureau of Sanitation to find out exactly what the law is surrounding the blue bins on the street. I spoke to a very nice woman whom we’ll call “her” because I wasn’t listening when she gave me her name.

Me: From what I understand, once someone puts their blue bin on the street, the contents of the bin, at that moment, belong to the city, correct?

Her: That’s correct.

Me: So what is the penalty for someone coming by and opening the container and taking the aluminum cans out?

Her: We don’t have anyone to go around and enforce that regulation.

Me: So there’s really nothing stopping someone from doing that.

Her: That’s right.

Me: Okay, well, what about putting things in the blue bins? To take a random example, can a guy who lives in an apartment take his newspapers and walk down the street to a house and drop his papers in someone else’s blue bin out on the street?

Her: Yes, that’s okay.

Me: It is?

Her: Yes.

Oh. Well, that settles that then. And if anyone comes out of their house and yells at me, well, I can always quote what’s-her-name at the Bureau of Sanitation.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to hunt down that printer and ask him if those recycling brochures ever gained in popularity. He’s gone out of business. Come to think of it, I don’t think I ever read the brochure. I hope I recycled it.

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