Monday, October 21, 2024

Monday, 10/21

You want proof recycling pays? I found $10 in our recycling bin this weekend.

No; seriously, I found a $10 bill in our paper bin Saturday as I was (and i'm not kidding here) looking for a piece of chocolate I dropped into it. Trying to find just WHERE the chocolate landed I was moving things around and 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 last 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.

So there you go.

This brings up two points, the first being that I really need to pay better attention to the money I carry around with me. 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 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 now I noticed it in the first place. The $10 bill would've just gone out to the Marquette County Landfill where it would've slowly decomposed along with the egg shells, Loraine's banana peel, and whatever funky stuff ended up in the garbage this week.

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!

(jim@wmqt.com)

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