Garbage recycling facility at Wellesley, MA

Every once in a while, its good to make a few diversions and write about more, if i may call it, technical stuff. Here is an account of the garbage recycle / disposal facility at Wellesly, MA that i went to.

Now, one may be thinking, why the hell is he writing about a garbage facility? But bear with me..

I am sitting in freezing Boston, enjoying my first snowfall. I am at my cousin's place for the holidays. Because of the lack of anything to do, i went with my brother-in-law to dispose off their garbage. Seems like a mundane activity and why would one volunteer for such a thing !

However, with these thoughts in mind, i went there. Observation 1: The facility is huge. I have seen the facilities in Pune, they are small (here, i am not talking about the size of the actual garbage, but the size of the facility). Observation 2: It is clean !!

There are 4 parts of the facility:
1) Recycling part
2) Disposal part
3) Compost pit part
4)


In the first part, there are huge containers with labels on them. People sort their recyclable garbage into categories such as plastic bags, bottles, cans, cardboard boxes, newspaper etc etc. The containers are clean, and neatly labeled ! People religiously sort their garbage into the containers. Behind the containers, trucks and cranes are used to shift the garbage to different locations for processing. Then the trash is recycled (unfortunately it was too cold to be stayin there for long and feed my curiosity).

The second part is the disposal part. Its pretty straight-forward, so i needn't explain in detail.

The third part is the compost pit part. In new england, they collect tons of leaves as a result of fall. They put those leaves in the compost pit to be converted to fertilizer. The locals use the fertilizer for the rest of the year.

Santya, you would like this part:

The fourth part is the most exciting part of the facility. It consists of about a wall full of bookshelves. People keep their old / unwanted books here !! Anyone can take books from here and put them here. Its like a book recycling station. Isnt that an awesome idea !

The books i found there:
1) About 100 novels which i had already read
2) About 50 novels which i hadnt read, but planned to read and couldnt buy becuz couldnt afford them
3) About 100 novels i hadnt heard of
4) About 15 books on calculus
5) About 20 books on biology, microbiology, genetics etc including Lehninger ! (not the person, but the book)
6) About 50 books on maths, comp science.

Isnt that a great idea ?? I was so engrossed in checking out the books there, that i momentarily forgot that i was cold and my nose was about to bleed ! (well not really bleed, but i thought it might) But the point behind this is that , instead of throwing away books, if we start something like this, it would be a wonderful thing. In a country like India, where books are not as affordable, this system could work wonders. I remember goin to the road between VT and churchgate in Mumbai where street vendors sell books at dirt cheap prices. I remember finding some good books there. But most of them are stolen / found / sold as 'raddi' books. Why cant we have a system like that in India?? I strongly think we should. I am definitely gonna think about how i could implement that in India. Anyone has any ideas??


So, to end this post quite abruptly, i just want to point out that we can do a lot better if we could implement a similar system.