A Deeper Shade of Blue

A coworker, Brian Seklecki, lives within the city of Pittsburgh. Like most cities, Pittsburgh has a recycling program. It's organized fairly well: you put recycling in blue garbage bags and non-recyclable garbage in bags of some color other than blue. The collection folks then know what to do with the bags.

Except there's apparently some confusion about the color.

Keep in mind, that there's blue, then there's not blue.

You'd think that'd be it, but apparently there's something between blue and not blue that's neither blue nor not.

Try this experiment. First, imagine that you're a city employee and that it's your responsibility to ensure that the streets are free of garbage so the city of Pittsburgh is never the set for a Christian Children's Fund commercial. Your job is tough, on the day of this experiment, it's five below zero and raining (typical weather for March in Pittsburgh). You're running behind schedule and you don't want to get stuck taking the garbage truck home with you because you got to the dump after it closed. You pull up the curb and see this.

What do you do? Under all that pressure, can you figure out which bags are recycling and which are garbage? Remember, you don't have a lot of time to think about it ... you have to make a snap decision!

The hard-working city employees who work Brian's neighborhood have come up with an interesting solution. It seems the brand of recycling bags that Brian purchased are not blue enough to be recycling. Interestingly, they're also too blue to be garbage.

As a result, the waste management folks decided to just leave them on the curb.

Apparently, there's some sort of limblue -- a pergutory blue where you're not blue enough to be recycled, but you're too blue to be garbage. Obviously, when faced with this blue, the safest thing to do is just leave it sit on the curb. I mean, those pickup folks are the only line of defense protecting the recycling plant from contamination -- if they were to mistakenly put garbage in the recycling pile, there's no telling what the next batch of pop bottles might have embedded in the plastic! And I can't even imagine the horrible consequences of recyclable material accidentally getting tossed in the normal trash!

No -- they're right, the best thing to do is simply leave it on the curb and hope the problem goes away.

Fact is stranger than fiction ... I can't make this stuff up.