Green Adventure

Appetite for Destruction

This week, I haven't been feeling my best, with a migraine that's been bothering me on and off, and a cold that seems to be trying to gather strength. This Saturday morning, still feeling under the weather, I thought, what could cheer me up?

The answer, of course: Breaking glass!

I have an 8-year-old boy's love of random destruction, and so the Center Street Recycling Depository was the place to be. (3602 Center St., Houston, TX - accepting newspaper, magazines, office paper; glass food & beverage bottles and jars; #1 -5, and 7 plastics; tin & aluminum food cans; cardboard boxes-broken down)

The Center St. depository combines two of my favorite things - industrial landscapes and throwing bottles and listening to them break. Situated next to the train tracks and several warehouses, it's not a place that you could find without help. I discovered it because I frequently whined about how curbside recycling here doesn't pick up glass. Enough whining, and someone said, "Well, you can drop it off on Center St."

I don't know why curbside doesn't pick up glass; I think that's strange, but it does mean I get to go to the recycling depository. It's a happy place fore a few reasons: the aforementioned train tracks and warehouses (I don't know, I just love them); the sight of good folks recycling (mostly graying ex-hippie do-gooder types, but it warms my heart that there are always people there); but mostly the fact that I get to throw my bottles into huge dumpsters where they crash into a heap of broken glass, creating a cathartic feeling of happy destructiveness.

Here's what you can look forward to at the recycling depository ...

At the depository, a Whole Foods bag filled with microbrew bottles is the de rigeur accessory. Luckily, I was prepared.

Here's where you get to throw your bottles! It makes a pretty noise of breaking! You can bring green, amber, and clear glass.

See? Industrial landscapes!

I do sometimes wonder, however, if recycling my bottles is worth the carbon emissions it takes to get to the depository (which today were compounded by the fact that I spent about 5 minutes idling in the Starbucks drive-thru on the way home). That's the kind of question you just can't answer easily. Oh well! Breaking glass!