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Recycling Life

Mike Sharlow

    When I thought of recycling, I always thought it was clean green, whate. . .
er that means, but I never imagined it to be what it was. I pictured an almost sterile workplace with order and special machines that sorted and washed the plastic, glass, aluminum, and anything else worth recycling. I thought the place would be technologically advanced, almost completely automated. The workers there would be fairly compensated for their labor. After all, recycling is a progressive idea, a save the planet idea, a make the world a better place for everyone idea.
    I worked for a not for profit organization which supports adults with disabilities, called participants, integrate into the workforce. My job, as an Employment Trainer, was to assist the participants at their workplaces. What I did was known as job coaching. As a job coach I stood alongside or near the participant, as he or she did their job. If necessary, I instructed and guided the participant to do the job as expected. The jobs, where my employer placed the participants, were almost always menial and simple tasks. As one of my coworkers stated, “The participants always got the jobs no one else wants to do.”
    The site I was assigned to was at the recycling center for a local refuse and waste management company which contracted through the city to pick up our trash and our recyclables. They picked up my trash every Wednesday and my recyclables every other Wednesday. Now I got to see where my stuff went to be processed and eventually reused.
    On July 10^th at 10:00 AM I met the participant, James, at the recycling center office. It was a clear, hot, and humid summer day. James and Kelly the Employment Specialist, the person who got James the job, were waiting for me inside. “Hi Mick.” Kelly took me by surprise. She was standing just inside the door. I didn’t know how old she was, but if I guessed, I would say she was late twenties, early thirties. She was about five-four, petite fit body. She wore tight jeans to accentuate her figure. She had a noble pretty face with a sharp defined jaw, brown eyes, and brown hair. She had a nose ring which made me wonder if she had other piercings. I had spoken with Kelly on the phone, but this was the first time I had met her in person. She stood close to me, inside my bubble. Normally, I feel uncomfortable with this, and I would have taken a step back, but with her I basked in her proximity. She didn’t wear any perfume, not that I could smell, and I really didn’t notice any odor, but I thought I sensed a subtle vibe from her, but she had a ring on, and I was never really very good at picking up the abstract signals from women, so I didn’t do anything. If anything was going to happen, she had to become more overt.
    “This is James.” She pointed at a short slight of build guy with long graying hair pulled into a ponytail. I was a bit taller than he was, outweighed him by probably twenty pounds, and I think I was older, although I only had hints of gray. He looked like he was Native American, but he wore a noticeable crucifix around his neck. I wonder if he understood or knew about the genocide imparted upon the First Nations people by those white folks whom claimed to be Christians. “One nation under God.” After all, everyone knows this doesn’t refer to any First Nation people’s God. This was the preferential white man’s God. This was the God of Manifest Destiny.
    “Hey James, how are you?”
    “Good.”
    “Ready to go to work?”
    “The recycling plant is over there.” Kelly pointed South.
    “I know where it’s at. I drove past it,” I said.
    “Well, have a good shift, James.” Kelly stepped towards the door I came in. “If you go out the door through the office, you’ll be closer to the plant.” The Employment Specialist not only shows up on the participant’s first day of work, but typically spends a little time to watch the participant work, for maybe a half hour. I thought it was a bit odd that Kelly was leaving. Maybe she had another appointment.
    James and I walked through the yard. There were huge cubes about ten feet high by ten feet wide of compacted recyclables, almost crushed beyond recognition. The gray dirt yard was littered with small pieces of glass, not a place to walk barefoot or even shoes with thin souls. I was wearing my Skechers. The rubber soles were good. James had on a beat-up pair of white Jordans.
    Forklifts were driving around kicking up white-gray dust. I wondered why the dirt was gray, but then it occurred to me that it was gray from garbage, refuse and recycling broken free and then being pulverized into the ground. I had never seen dirt that looked quite like this. It looked toxic. It looked like nothing would ever grow in it, but if something did it would be some weird mutation.
    The supervisors wore blue uniforms. There was a thin guy wearing a navy-blue shirt and pants waiting for us outside the plant, a big yellow metal building. His clothes were dirty, like he had already put in a hard day’s work and it was only 10:00 am. His name was Bill. I shook his hand, even though it was filthy. I was not averse to getting dirty. In the past I’ve had jobs in construction and manufacturing. I knew what this was about.
    After introductions, Bill led us into the plant. It didn’t take long before there was an assault on my senses. At first, my brain, not quite willing to believe what I was smelling, denied the odor. This can’t be. The immediate heat combined with the stench kicked in my gag mechanism. I was surprised at how involuntary it was. This rarely happened to me. I typically had a strong stomach, but this smell was like sticking your head into a sour, fetid, dirty dumpster smelling of rot on a hot summer day.
    Bill led us over to a vending machine full of rubber work gloves, foam ear plugs, plastic safety glasses, and paper filter masks. Bill punched in a code and selected two pair of ear plugs dropped. “You’ll definitely want these,” and he handed a pair to James and me. He punched the button for gloves too. “You’ll need these.” He handed them to James. “Do you want safety glasses or a mask?” Bill was wearing safety glasses and ear plugs. He had gloves tucked in his back pocket. James and I both wore eyeglasses. These safety glasses wouldn’t fit over James’ glasses. My eyeglasses were smaller, but I told Bill I was fine with my glasses. Bill didn’t have a mask, and James didn’t want one, so I passed on it also even though I wanted to take one. Fortunately, even after a couple of minutes my olfactory sense was numbing, and the stench had subsided to a less than nauseous level.
    “I’ll show you where you’ll be working.” Bill led us to a dirty steel staircase. It had a hand-railing on both sides, but I didn’t use them. I could tell that everything in this building had a layer of grime. As we climbed the stairs, we were walking over garbage which had overflowed from a massive machine which sorted the recyclables by violently grinding and shaking them, as it made an unearthly noise of chunking, clanking, and rattling of steel. It was constantly spitting trash over the side like a humongous metal monster who was a sloppy eater and couldn’t keep food in its maw.
    At the top of the stairs there was a walkway running alongside the massive sorting machine. A young woman in shorts, a t-shirt with the sleeves cut off, and brown work boots was shoveling and tossing the recyclables back into the sorting machine. She was young, cute, and tan. I didn’t know whether the hard work here had built her body, or she had been endowed with this body. It was probably a combination of both. Her clothes, and her exposed skin was filthy. It was hot outside, but it was hotter inside this tin building. Sweaty skin was a magnet for the filthy dust flying around this place, and the skin on this girl’s body had acquired a film of gray. It was only 10:00 AM and this was how dirty she was.
    Bill led James and I to the station where we would be working. This operation was beginning to make sense. It looked like the monstrous sorting machine shook out most things smaller than aluminum cans then dropped everything else onto a conveyor belt where four guys stood picking out aluminum cans, plastic bottles, and anything plastic and dropped these down chutes next to the conveyor. Anything else metal, like wiring, was thrown into a plastic barrel to be further sorted somewhere else. Only the paper products were remaining, and they ended up getting sucked down a big chute at the end of the conveyor, except for an occasional soiled Playboy, Penthouse, or any other nudie magazine the guys would pick off the line and toss aside for later.
    Bill showed James where he needed to stand at the conveyor. I stood off to the side and tried to stay out of the way. There was a guy standing next to James and two guys standing on the other side. All these guys looked like they could be relatives of Pigpen from Peanuts. One of the guys had earbuds connected to his phone instead the foam ear plugs. One of the other guys didn’t have anything in his ears. Long term unprotected exposure to the racket in this building had to do damage. I was planning to get my earbuds from my car at lunch, which was almost two hours from now. James was scheduled to work until 2:00 pm.
    There was a big digital sign attached to the railing next to the sorting machine. Lit up in red light it displayed the date, the time, and the temperature. Right now, at 10:18 AM on 07/10 it was 86 F in the building. There was three-foot diameter fan on a pedestal blowing on the guys working the conveyor. I stood so that some of the air hit me too, but it wasn’t long before I felt a film begin to stick to my skin and an irritation in my eyes. I realized I was in the direct line of fire of whatever dirt ridden bacteria from Hell that was floating in the air. These minute mutant diseased causing particles latched onto everyone and everything even without the fans, but the fans speeded up the process.
    James picked up the job quickly, but there wasn’t much to the job. If you could identify an aluminum can and a plastic bottle and throw it down the correct chute, you understood the job. Participants, like James, always got the menial task jobs like washing dishes at restaurants, wiping down tables at the student universities, or picking up trash at the parks. Granted, this made sense for people with cognitive disabilities, but this job at the recycling plant was a special slice of hell no human being should be subjected. Even the 13^th Amendment, which basically allows slave labor for prisoners, would have probably considered the recycling plant a breach of the 8^th Amendment which is about cruel and unusual punishment.
    At 12:00 PM the plant was 93 F. The machines were shut down, and everyone went outside for lunch. Some people sat in the shade and some people sat in the sun. Even in the sun it wasn’t as hot as it was in the plant. I sat in the shade with James. “Do you bring anything to eat?”
    “No, I can eat when I get home,” he said.
    “How do you like this job?”
    “I’m glad I’m making money.”
    James wasn’t like most of the participants with disabilities. If he had a cognitive disability, it wasn’t immediately apparent. When the participant appeared and acted relatively normal, mental illness was usually the disability.
    With most participants you know within the first few seconds of meeting them and often just by looking at them. People with disabilities often look different, especially those with Downs, as everyone knows. Whatever DNA that went awry, not only affected their brain, affected their bodies and facial features.
    Given all that, sometimes people with disabilities have incredible abilities. I knew a woman, Margaret, who remembered everything I told her. Once I told her that I was a little miffed with my son for not doing the dishes. Over a week later when I saw her again, she asked me, “Did your son do the dishes?” She remembered my birthday, and she remembered my kids’ birthdays after telling her once. Margaret wasn’t an isolated case. There were others with abilities that were akin to genius. The problem was that the ability was isolated in their brain, like it was stranded on a desert island without the ability to enhance or communicate with the rest of their brain. The ability was basically relegated to something like a good magic trick. It was cool and amusing, but there was little practical application in real life.
    During the lunch break James told me that he hadn’t had a job in a long time. “I’m living with my sister. I’d like to get my own place. It’s been a long time since I had my own place.”
    “Where did you live before?” I asked.
    “Not around here.”
    James didn’t want to talk about his past. I think I knew what was going on. He hadn’t had a job or his own place in a long time. I think James was incarcerated. Whether it was a prison or mental health facility, either way he couldn’t leave.
    So, my employer in its infinite wisdom, for the welfare and dignity of James, retained employment for him in a place on the east side of Hell. If you didn’t have mental or physical health issues before you came to work at the recycling plant, you probably did by the time you escaped.
    When we went back to work, I looked at the digital time, date, and temperature sign. At 12:32 PM it was 92 F in the plant. The bacterial laden dust was sticking to me. I could feel a film on my phone minutes after I took out of my pocket. I plugged my headphones in and listened to music. I had to have it on full volume to overcome the rattle, chunk, grind, and hum of the plant.
    Staring at the conveyor roll by, watching James and the other guys pick the recycle stuff off, was hypnotic. When I looked up everything around me appeared to be in motion for a few seconds. I tried not to stare at the conveyor, but it always sucked me back. There really wasn’t much else to look at other than the operation below and behind me. Every thirty seconds or so a large machine opened like a mouth and vomited out a slew of plastic milk cartons onto a conveyor. The cartons rode the conveyor and disappeared into a black hole of another machine. The milk cartons looked like sheep marching into a volcano.
    James found a dollar floating down the conveyor belt. Big score.
    An occasional book came along, so I grabbed it before it got sucked into the recycling. Usually it was a worthless piece of shit I wasn’t interested in, so I threw it back on the conveyor to be recycled. Unfortunately, there are a lot of books better off turned into pulp then paper again to print another book worth reading.
    I couldn’t help watching the clock. It was directly in front of me. I watched it digitally rotate between the time, the date, and the temperature about a hundred times. At 2:00 when James and I finished our shift the temperature was 93 F inside the building.
    “You know where to catch the bus James?”
    “He rides the same one I do,” said a guy with a wild reddish-blond beard, filthy blue athletic shorts, a formerly white t-shirt, as he leaned forward on one of the old dirty plastic lawn chairs meant for the workers during break.
    In my town, people who could afford cars and had their driver’s license didn’t ride the bus. It took a meandering route to get riders home. A fifteen-minute drive was a forty-five-minute bus ride.
    “Whatever they pay you, it’s not enough,” I said.
    “I’m saving up to get a car, so I can get back into the Walmart Distribution Center in Tomah.” said the guy with a beard.
    A guy in dirty jeans, beat up high tops, and a blue t-shirt walked up. “Ready to go?” he asked the guy with a beard.
    Another bus rider. Do any of the laborers own a car? I wondered. “I’ll see you later, James.” Those words were painful to say. On Wednesday I knew I would be back here.
    On Thursday Kelly sent me and Kurt, another job coach, an email.

    Hi Mick and Kurt!
    I was wondering I could get an update on James? I’m hoping to fade coaching soon. I was with him for an hour today and it seems like he’s doing a great job for his first week!
    Let me know! :)

    I replied:
    Kelly,
    I think he has it down: his speed and attention to sorting is good. It won’t be long before he’s as fast as the other workers. When I was with him yesterday he did complain about getting the vile dust that blows around in his eyes. He needs something to go over his glasses. He said he had eye protection at home that would go over his glasses. Hopefully they worked. I didn’t wear anything other than my prescription glasses the first day I was there, and my eyes were irritated for two days. When I walked into that building the first time, I almost gagged. It smells like I stuck my head in an old dirty garbage can. I’ve had some crappy, dirty, hard jobs in my day, but you couldn’t pay me enough to work in that place. James is doing a great job. Please fade soon.
    Am I being punished for something that I have job coach there?
    Thanks,
    Mick

    Kelly replied:
    Thanks for the update, Mick!
    Oh my goodness, I feel ya! I was there for an hour yesterday and within the first couple of minutes my eyes were irritated! I made sure that James had eye protection because he did mention that dust was getting in his eyes. The smell is HORRIBLE! So I hear ya! I will plan to fade coaching. I’m glad to hear that James is doing great though! You’re not being punished! James options were limited for work because we had to find a placement where they didn’t do drug screens... unfortunately his only options were crappy, dirty jobs like Recycling. As long as he’s liking it and we can fade coaching, that’s a win win! Let me know if you have any questions!
    Thanks again for your hard work. WE appreciate it
    The recycling center was making a fortune by apparently saving the planet. They didn’t drug test, because if they did, they wouldn’t get anyone to work there for the insulting wage they offer. I’m sure James was a pot smoker. If he was an opioid or meth addict the company I worked for wouldn’t have offered him services. Surely, if you weren’t a pot smoker before you worked at the recycling center, you might be once you did. An escape from the mind-numbing work and the hell-like environment would be necessary.

    I replied to Kelly’s email:
    I was joking about the punishment part. . .I hope you know.

    About a week later Kelly sent another email:
    I wanted to let you all know that I plan on fading coaching for James next week to 1pm-3pm.
    Let me know if you have any questions!
    Thanks

    I replied:
    Kelly,
    It couldn’t happen soon enough. If I had to spend too much more time there, I thought about investing in a hazmat suit with a respirator and oxygen tank. Honestly, every time I look at a worker there, I see Pigpen from Peanuts. Don’t get me wrong, Pigpen is an adorable and beloved character. What I am saying is: it takes a special breed of cat to work there, and I’m not that kind of cat.
    Thanks,
    Mick

    Kelly replied:
    Oh Mick, you just made my day! I literally laughed out loud.
    I agree with you though, I’m not that “special breed” of cat either!
    P.S. I LOVE Pigpen from Peanuts... but I totally see what you’re trying to say...

    This was the last email exchange I had with Kelly about the recycling center. I, nor anyone else, was scheduled there to job coach James anymore. He was on his own, and fully capable of handling the job, but I wondered if the company I worked for, whose mission statement was to provide participants like James with employment, so they could have a life of dignity and purpose, was really acting in James’ best interest. How could James, or anyone else who worked at the recycling center, find a life of dignity for shit pay in a biohazard that could most certainly make them sick and maybe eventually kill them?
    As far as Kelly goes, we would cross paths again.

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