Key West Bight

Key West is struggling desperately to increase recycling quotas. There was recently one of those weird big community struggles over the number of pickups weekly in the city. Proponents of once a week garbage pick up stood their ground saying the reduced garbage collection tripled  recycling rates. The vocal opponents of once a week pick up demanded that collection be doubled to  reduce smell and rotting trash in this tropical heat. This enraged the once a week crowd because they thought recycling rates  would plummet. It turned into urban guerrilla warfare with both sides sniping and commenting in the daily paper while the Blue Paper  did  a brilliant investigation of this massive problem.  The result was they continue to toy with a typhus outbreak and continue to pick up trash once a week.

I live in the county and my trash is picked up Mondays and Thursdays so I watched the great trash debate from a distance. Mind you I have never smelt rotten smells or seen maggots like the critics charged and I walk around a lot of trash cans. On the nicer side you can enjoy palms in the Southernmost City.

 Or masts.

 Old school drinking at Schooner Wharf Bar...

 ...and the new brew pub where the hipsters will no doubt congregate and music will be played and complaints will be called in. Key West sees more than its fair share of complaining I think. So I am hoping they offer a few gentler beers, less hoppy IPA fashionable beers and more milder and smoother beers for old men like me. I am not holding my breath. 

I did a weird walking tour of Popular Places People Prefer, and for some reason the Conch Republic is popular. I prefer Alonzo's for fish but the Conch Farm does land sale business. They call it the Conch Farm because they grow Conch to try to repopulate the reef with Conch which have been hunted to extinction. Please bear in mind "Conch" is pronounced "Konk." Konsh is unforgiveable and causes strong men to wince when heard on the streets of Key West.

I  took this picture of Kermit's the Key Lime store, another popular haunt which I like a lot. Sometimes at night I stand in front of the TV screen for as long as Cheyenne will let me and I listen to the Asian voice talking about key limes and pies and whatever it is they are saying. Its weird to me how popular this place is but I guess its the power of marketing, a lesson to be learned. Then I messed around with the picture and made into some peculiar kind of painting. Digital photography si the shitz as young people are wont to say. 

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What A Funny Old Life I Found

My latest visit to my Big Pine hair clipper was of no great note, a quiet afternoon when I expected to be in and out in a jiffy. Instead this little kid was in the chair in front of me and boy was he exacting. He wanted more here and less there and on and on and on. Even his mother got tired of his pretensions. I dread to think what kind of fashion maven he's growing into. On the other hand maybe all modern kids are like that. I hope he tipped well; I did.

I never gave much of a toss about my hair style and even now I tell the cutter to clip round the ears and make me respectable and those are the extent of my instructions. Leave the beard alone I say now after suffering some major clipping. I aspire to look like Rasputin below the chin...but I do have clippers at home to help keep the professional beard rippers at bay.

My boss says I should be going back to night shift in late February- probably- and I miss working nights but we are doing good work training on days in a special new schedule I and my boss dreamed up. Having dreamed it up she anointed me to implement our first training program on the new regime and here I am still working during daylight hours in the 911 center. Belen was waving hi! while her sister-in-law Nelly was looking pensive. Don't be fooled they are tough opinionated Cuban women and they keep me toeing the line obediently.

The advantage of working days is I get to take walks during daylight and maybe do a little light shopping on my lunch breaks. I also get to be in town in the evening after work if I can bring myself not to hurry home to my dog 27 miles away. I saw this realtor's sign and got a kick out of the weed filled landscaping combined with the sign offering the "finest real estate. " Marketing hyperbole as usual, and I'm tired of it all.

I found out what Waste Management does when they come across a recycling bin filled with trash. They put a polite note on the bin and try to educate the owner. Fat chance. I saw my friends Robert and Dolly had bought a big blue recycling bin for use in their home in the county and I decided to do the same so now we have a 45 Gallon bin and we seem to be filling it easily for weekly pick up. Our trash output is minuscule by comparison.

I love these old fashioned signs "Tag Applied For" like they are fooling anyone. If you don't have a tag it can't be on the road if it is supposed to have one and if you really have applied for a tag they will pass it over the counter to you when you pay for it.

Here's another one. I'm a non smoker but anyone who thinks a Key Lime Pie flavored cigar sounds good should be one too. Grotesque.

We saw two movies at the Key West Film festival and they were both monumental downers. In Big Sur Jack Kerouac went through a ghastly depression and all the interesting people he knew in his life were kept at arm's length making the movie a depressive monologue under the dripping redwoods and above crashing ocean waves all under foggy skies. The last time I rode Big Sur it was summer and I froze my ass off from Carpinteria to Carmel even though my Yamaha 650 Maxim was equipped with a full Vetter fairing, so my love affair with Big Sur is a mixed memory. Oh and monstrously priced hamburgers at the Nepenthe restaurant. No wonder Kerouac was depressed. We walked out before the end, else we'd have slit our wrists.

Then we went back to the Tropic Cinema to see August: Osage County a two hour epic of women screaming at each other and everyone incestuously chewing each other to pieces in a giant old suffocating farmhouse, set in Armpit Oklahoma. All I could tell my wife as we left the screening at the end was that my family wasn't as bad but they were real while those harridans on screen were at least fictional.

I really like my old age in this crazy town a mixture of culture, madness, sunlight and heat. What a brew.

Key West on Dwellable

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Recycling Continues To Fail

Behold a Key West recycling bin.

I have no explanation why people would throw trash in recycling and leave their trash an empty:

Nowadays recycling is pretty simple in Key West where we have single stream. Clean your cardboard plastic and metal and dump it in one container. That's all it takes. Plastic bags are not recyclable, nor is food or dog shit or rags and cotton waste. How hard is that?

Impossible for a lot of people who live at water's edge on a small vulnerable island very close to nature. I'm not one to imagine that we will reverse global warming or gain Utopia by virtue of recycling, and maybe the whole program is nothing more than a feel good measure for a population that generates twenty five percent of the worlds trash (while generating one third of the world's economic activity I might add!). Nevertheless it is a mark of the lack of any kind of social commitment or discipline that recycling bins overflow with common-or-garden trash every single day across this town. Wherever they be from.

Waste Management finally got the much desired blue recycling bins and at the same time the count commission scrapped requirements for competitive bidding for the waste contract which sounds at best unethical and at worst illegal so one wonders what kind of legal eagles are advising the County. Perhaps that was why when I wrote an email to waste management enclosing he first photograph asking what happens when recycling gets polluted, my reply was a form letter of no apparent substance or decipherable meaning.

I remember decades ago when a friend told me of an article she had read about how people in New Zealand had to clean and crush cans before they threw them out and we wondered at such strict trash requirements. Since then I have taken to recycling as second nature without much of a thought about it, except when I see stuff that makes me wonder, once again, about the self interest of my fellow humans. Washington State is a marvel of disciplined trash disposal, and if the San Juan Islands can do it, why can't we?

It's not that hard to do, and if it does no discernible good as critics claim, it does no visible harm either as far as I can tell.

It's time Key West got serious about recycling, as serious as it got recently on the subject of rejecting bigger cruise ships.

 

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Minimalist Recycling

The paper had reported recently that recycling rates in the Keys had shot up from seven percent to 27 percent. Which number must be Keys wide because a more recent article mentioned a rate in the city of Key West of barely ten percent. There seems to be a culture of willful turning away in Key West sometimes that makes it seem as though connections with the outside world are as tenuous as they may have been in 1828 when the newly founded city depended on the shipping trade for word of trends and tastes across the waters. I read the city of Madison, Wisconsin's Recyclopedia and I was astonished: Wisconsinland: Study It I was astonished by the tedious nature of it, but also by the embarrassing lack of education on the subject in the Southernmost City.

The city has made half hearted efforts to get people to recycle and some public recycling bins have appeared around town but it turns out the big obstacle to recycling is the color of the bins. I kid you not. Trash cans are green, thus:

Household recycling bins have yellow lids and the newspaper quotes city Commissioner Clayton Lopez as a brave pioneer in accepting and using these yellow-topped bins to recycle his household waste. The new bins we are promised, will be blue. Well that's a relief I'm sure.

The real insurmountable problem is a lack of education on the part of leaders and a lack of interest on the part of followers. Single stream recycling it's called but it doesn't necessarily mean mixing recyclables and food. Take a look in any recycle bin and see how little the concept is understood. Does this mess below count as part of the ten percent?

My understanding is that plastic bags gum up the recycling machines and should be put in the trash. Also bagging slows the ultimate separation of recyclables. None of this poses a problem to people in Key West who throw whatever in whatever recycling bin and call it good and give themselves the wrm fuzzier for doing their bit. Some radicals argue recycling does nothing to reverse the wasteful over use of natural resources and it's just a feel good program for wasteful consumers. Who am I to argue? I don't know the intricacies of the issue but it seems to me we have to start somewhere and recycling should be the first step on a long path toward more mindful use of the natural treasures of our only habitable and therefore exploitable planet we call home. For some people it's all or nothing; I am not one of those.

The city has even put out public recycling bins around town, and that's a step in the right direction. However if they came with instructions it would be better for recyclers of good will. I don't know of any recycling program that accepts pillows, in Seattle or Madison they might disown me for such ignorance but in the Keys we are still struggling with the concept of proper recycling being a common good. A few years ago an entrepreneur tested a bottle crushing recycler for bars and restaurants, the major sources of reusable glass in the city. All the employee had to do was drop a bottle in the $5,000 machine which would crush it to powder reducing space consumed by empty bottles and putting the powder back into circulation as a potential future bottle. Brilliant, no? Rejected of course by Key West bars that happily fill the city with empty smelly bottles by the thousand. That rejection has led the lazy and uncommitted to argue that recycling their modest twelve packs is a wate of time. Fair enough I suppose, yet I would privately hope for better from my neighbors. Where we lead the bars and City Commissioner Mark Rossi will eventually follow. He owns the ten bars inside the Rick's complex and has about as much commitment to sustainability as anyone in authority in this city. He should be out front, for this city has done him proud over the years.

Let's face it, drunks drinking on the streets will have grave difficulty recycling. We can find them having difficulty controlling their bladders on city streets and people's yards so what to do with their bottles and cans will likely be beyond them. So our public recycling containers end up looking like this:

Some people prefer to put their household surplus on the streets, often the subject of my photos, which could be construed as art or recycling I suppose, yet...

...in this town so close to our struggling oceans, to North America's only still living reef, a town likely to be drowned by climate change or whipped to matchsticks by hurricanes of increasing severity it seems odd to me that something as simple, as fundamental as basic as recycling, is simply out of reach. When I lived in Northern California I never felt up to snuff, I always felt a little behind the politically correct curve whether it was on foreign policy, feminism or the waste stream. In Key West some days I feel like a positive pioneer, far out ahead of the field. And that thought saddens me, as I know I don't know much.

I clean my containers, cut up my cardboard and keep any styrofoam (they still sell coffee in unrecyclable styrofoam ferchrissakes in Key West!) and plastic bags out of the boxes I use. I don't even find it that hard or taxing, but I've been doing it for years. Thirty years ago I remember a friend telling me about eccentric New Zealanders required to clean and crush cans before committing them to the waste stream. How odd I thought! Never imagining it would fall to me to do the same. I was also sceptical when a well meaning friend told me aerosols destroyed the atmosphere, but that too came to pass and be changed. Perhaps one day leaders around here will remember their grandchildren and act to do what's right, what may help, what may require discipline and thought in a culture devoted to neither, at least superficially.

Years ago while visiting a Key West friend I remarked on the trash In the bushes and the gutters when I lived in a town even then devoted to private recycling plans in the community. Oh he said, this is a transient town filled with tourists and no one has a commitment. Wrong I thought at the time and still do. Yet that belief butts up against a community dedicated to not just not recycling, but screwing up the little we do have that tries to work in that direction. If it's proper place is in doubt, toss it in the trash and leave recycling to the odd few of us who want to give recycling a proper chance.

This is the week my 34 year old Vespa goes to Pennsylvania to be "recycled" and restored into a re-creation of my youth. Thanks to my wife for supporting this endeavor that ended up costing more than it's worth. This fall I hope to commute on my P200 and as I ride I shall think of it as the ultimate and most fun expression of the reduce, reuse, recycle ethic of the 21st century. Well, a little bullshit is allowed surely isn't it? I'll ride my elderly two stroke 230 pound lump of metal at 65 miles per gallon and call it recycled alongside the brand new SUVs and massive pick ups that sport bumper stickers advocating "energy independence." In the end we do what we want and damn the consequences, let's be honest.

 

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The Dump

One of the features of living in a county a hundred miles long and a mile wide is that every government service has to be offered in triplicate, at least. Schools, policing, vehicle registration and not least, dumps are scattered up and down the Keys.

The one closest to my home is on Cudjoe Key and it is typical of them all I have no doubt. These are trash hauling trailers at the entrance.

I use bins at home for single stream recycling so what they do when you go to the office I wouldn't know. It's an intriguing question though.

This is where I bring my motorcycle oil after I've change it. It couldn't be simpler: just put the burnt oil container on the gravel filled box and leave it for staff to deal with. Brilliant!

I was hauling the rubbish from my porch remodel in my little utility trailer.


Stop on the scales.


Then find a spot to back up and unload your rubbish.

The dump is actually very organized as there are places set aside for specific items, for instance appliances and metals go round the building in the rear. There is always an employee on hand to ask.

I emptied the netting and rotten trim and worn out patio furniture and waved it all goodbye in the mirrors. It seemed a pungent place to say farewell.

Trash is hauled to the Pompano landfill one hundred and fifty miles away in the huge more-or-less covered trailers, up Highway One so these places are technically known as transfer stations.

The city's old waste to energy plant was decommissioned in favor of trash hauling and as only six percent of the waste stream is recycled the county's 75,000 permanent residents pay a pretty sum to deal with waste.


My load cost me $9.60 which seemed entirely reasonable at six cents a pound. It was worth it not to dump it in the mangroves as some of my neighbors do. One man's trash is another bird's treasure:


Four miles home and the job was done.


Irony of ironies.


Who dreams up the placement of these signs?


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