You want proof recycling pays? I found $10 in our recycling bin last night.
No; seriously, I found a $10 bill in our paper bin last night. And it's a good thing I found it, too. This is the first week of single-stream recycling in Marquette, the first week where you don't have to put out just papers or just plastics & metals. You can throw everything together. So instead of carefully going through the recycling I was just tossing everything into a bin, not really paying attention to what I was doing. When I brought it out to the curb, I noticed a strange looking orange-y piece of paper sticking out of the paper bin. I took a look, and lo and behold, there was a ten dollar bill, ready for me to grab.
See? It does pay to recycle.
Unlike many of these weird instances in my life, where a $10 bill might mysteriously appear in my life, I have a pretty good idea where this one came from. It was stuck to the grocery store receipt I tossed in the bin Saturday after getting back from the store. I believe what happened was the $10 was attached somehow to the receipt, and when I tossed the receipt into the bin I didn't notice the $10 bill stuck to it. It then became loose when I moved the bin around, and that's when I noticed it.
First, a buffalo nickel; now, a $10 bill. I suppose I should really start paying attention to the change I get, huh?
I'm serious. You'd think a normal, reasonably sane person would notice that they're missing a $10 bill, right? I mean, I always assumed that I would notice if I was missing a $10 bill. But nope. I can now say, with absolutely no pride at all, that I can throw a ten spot into the recycling bin and not even realize it.
I know. It's a gift.
The second thing is this—if I didn't recycle everything I could, I'd be out the ten bucks. If I didn't recycle I would've tossed the receipt and the money attached to it into the trash, and I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't have been randomly moving or digging through the trash enough to cause the money to get loose from the receipt, which is how I noticed it in the first place. The $10 bill would've just gone out to the Marquette County Landfill, where it would've ended up getting mulched into a pulp so the paper could be re-used to put together, I dunno, more grocery store receipts.
Like I said, it was a stupid mistake that I made tossing it in the first place. But thanks to the fact that I recycle 90% of the stuff I use, I was able to find the $10 bill I mistakenly tossed in the first place. So if you are ever told that recycling doesn't pay...
That person is lying. Trust me on that!
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