I grew up in Michigan where it’s easy to recycle cans and bottles. The deposit is 10 cents so there is value and nearly every grocery store has a room with machines that take your recyclables and spit out a receipt that you can cash at the cashier. You can even wash your hands!
Los Angeles is not like that. Most people throw away their cans because they aren’t worth as much and it’s harder to cash them in. The recycling centers are few and far between and they aren’t as friendly as a grocery store with a hand washing station. I was throwing them away because I heard that people go through the trash and pick out all my recyclables, but that was just a lie to make me feel better. My trash goes down a chute to a bin that is locked inside a building. Those cans are going straight to the landfill. So at the request of some of my neighbors, I started bagging up my cans and placing them next to the rubbish chute. I’m sure it’s against my buildings policy, but it was good for my neighbors and the environment, so I did it anyway. Until one of my friend’s, J, convinced me that there’s money in those cans. So I started saving, and soon, my apartment was filled with plastic, glass, and aluminum.
I knew that Flying Pigeon LA Bike Shop were the only people that could help me get rid of my cans and bottles in one fell swoop. I needed to borrow a Nihola!
My friend’s bike was broken too. So I brought her bike to FP, fixed it, brought it back to Downtown, and repacked the Nihola with recyclables. Turns out who ever put her bike together used a 1″ headset with a 1″ fork on a frame with a 1 1/8″ headtube. Wow. The bottom cup was cracked, the entire headset and crown race came off with just my fingers.
So we had to go to the Oven, borrow a tool to cut the fork down because it was all chipped, install a new crown race, install some stuff the converts the 1 1/8″ headtube in to 1″ and then finally put it all back together. Then I tied the fixed bike (is that a pun?) to the Nihola and biked it all back to downtown.
I was really happy when I packed every last can and bottle I had in that bike. I didn’t think it would all fit.
Recycling was easy. I highly recommend it. I got a little over 18 bucks.