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Boston proper has curbside, weekly recycling, bins that can be automatically delivered to you when you call the special number, and recycle a lot of items. Yesterday was trash day in our neighborhood, one of the nicest in the area. However, only about 5% of the people on our historic hillside recycle. I thought a lot about the RS.N conversation about the bottle bill, recycling, etc., etc., and talked with Beckybunny and PChippy last night about my thoughts. Here's what we came up with: Why don't people recycle in East Boston? 1. They don't know that they can, or how to do it. 2. It's not something that they did in their home country/it's a newfangled idea that they never had in Eastie--we don't go for that yuppie bullshit. 3. They are too busy scraping by to look up and notice the damage to the Earth-- we would, too, if we worked 90 hours a week and tried to raise a family at the same time. 4. Calling to ask for a recycling bin would alert INS to the fact that they're illegal. What could we do, or the government do to make people recycle? Scenario 1: 1. Send everyone a bin with a multiple-language brochure that describes how to recycle. Pretend that it's compulsory. 2. Then, send someone to their house who describes it to them in their language. Scenario 2: 1. Make MOST THINGS redeemable-- water bottles, cardboard, etc. (you laugh, but newspaper, cans, pretty much everything was redeemable up until around 1975.) 2. Raise the amount of the redeemable rate enough so that even yuppie scum bring their crap back. [Chippy and I usually leave our crap out for the people who collect redeemables. However, my mother remembers that when redeemables were 10 cents, you could get an icecream for 10 cents. THAT is incentive. We just don't have the time to bring our stuff back.] Scenario 3: The German way 1. Bottles are very thick, and RE-USED, rather than smashed and recycled. You pay 2 Euros for a coke, drink it, and bring back the bottle and get 1 Euro. 2. And they recycle everything, even the plastic wrapper around their twinkie. Thoughts?