ADVENTURES IN BEERLAND
| Vince Capano is a two time winner of the prestigious Quill and Tankard writing award for humor from the North American Guild of Beer Writers. Vince's column is now a regular feature of beernexus.com |
Trash Tells All
Recycling Day Did you ever want to be a Garbage Anthropologist? Me neither but it seems some do as the University of Arizona is proudly (?) conducting a study called the Garbage Project and has done so for the past several years. According to their findings the bottles, cans and food that we throw away can be very revealing. So far they have reached the following conclusions:
Now I’m sure those revelations were well worth the program’s cost as long as it was less than $3.25, but I am proposing a new study to the University of Arizona and any other institution, think tank, or individual with money they have no need for. Specifically, my study will answer the burning questions of what does a garbage can filled with empty beer bottles tell us about that person? Wait, we don’t use garbage cans to throw that sort of stuff out anymore, we now put them in recycling containers –a garbage man’s dream. Now he only carries half the load for the same amount of money. To validate my proposal I conducted a small pilot study at my own expense. Hey, what can I say, I’m an amateur Garbage Anthropologist at heart. I began by jogging through randomly selected locations on their recycling day. I thought about driving but wanted to try out the exercise program I discovered right here on BeerNexus called “KO Your Beer Belly”. No, no, I don’t have a beer belly I was just making sure BeerNexus would never publish false information. Off I went. The first thing I noticed was that I didn’t notice anything. Seems a lot of people do not recycle. Don’t they know that recycling prevents global warming? According to a new U.N. report, the global warming outlook is much worse than originally predicted which is pretty bad since they originally predicted it would destroy the planet. The planet heats up and eventually everything is boiled away. Don’t worry, I have long advocated a sure way to prevent the doomsayers’ predictions of record high temperatures - just switch from Fahrenheit to Celsius! As I turned the block I saw my first pile of stuff. There, neatly placed at curbside, were nearly a dozen empty bottles of Coke Zero and three pizza boxes. This was an easy one to figure out – the guy’s diet was failing and he doesn’t like beer. Right next to that pile were three more pizza boxes and six empty bottles of Miller 64. Conclusion: same as the first guy- diet failed and he hates beer. As I moved my jogging pace up an Olympian caliber 19 minutes per mile I was soon confronted by nearly a dozen plastic bags lining the curb outside an apartment building. Inside the bags was not a single beer, wine, or whisky bottle but instead bottle after bottle of water, and not any particular brand either. There were bottles of Nestle Pure Life, Aquafina, Dasani , seltzer water, Smart Water, tonic water, and more waters with “mountain” in their brand name then there are real ones in the Alps. They were all stuffed next to discarded boxes of Lean Cuisine, Healthy Heart, Diet Right, and other sorts of healthy prepackaged foods; not a McDonald’s wrapper was in site. Conclusion: this was the headquarters of the Jenny Craig Bring Back Prohibition Foundation. At the next corner I next came upon a large tub of plastic coffee cups, brown paper bags from Chipotle Mexican Grill, six Yoplait yogurt containers, and several Heinz ketchup bottles. All were stacked on three cases labeled “Sam Adams Lager”. Conclusion: the person who lived here was a Republican. Yes the Sam Adams was the key to deducing the person’s political leaning. Well it was that and the large “Romney for President” sign on the lawn. Farther down the road I saw several garbage cans topped off with Red Stripe, Molson and Dos Equis bottles. Conclusion: The Most Interesting Man in Canada is really Bob Marley. Three houses away I found what had to be 2,000 Coors Light cans left out for recycling, each with decidedly un-blue mountains. They were haphazardly placed in front of some fraternity house from Wossamotta U. No surprise here; just typical frat boys engaged in a vain attempt to get drunk in the Silver Bullet Train’s bar car. Fatigue from all this jogging and analyzing was setting in when I came upon a bag with 14 bottles of Chardonnay, two bottles of Absolute, and a bottle of what seemed to be Chilean wine. Ah, no beer. That seals it - my first Yuppie sighting of the day. Further down the street was a small open bin marked “recycling” loaded with Budweiser Select. Conclusion: this person is in therapy for feelings of inadequacy. Look at it this way, if Budweiser is the equivalent of Pepsi and Bud Light is like Diet Pepsi what then is the point of Budweiser Select? Is it supposed to be Bud Heavy despite its 4.2% alcohol level? I don't know. No wonder this guy is seeing a shrink. If only they hadn’t ended the Bud Bowl all his questions would have been answered and he’d already be on his way to mental health. Farther down the street were bottles of Corona and Corona Light. There were so many bottles that this could mean only one thing – someone had orchestrated a taste test to see if they could tell the difference between the two. Right, it’s the label. My mission had worked. Checking what people recycle is the pathway to understanding who they are. I had proven my point but a nagging question tugged at my consciousness. Do those recycled beer bottles come to a good end once again containing beer or do they suffer unfathomable indignities? A little research showed that, sadly, some meet a fate even worse than being filled with pumpkin beer. Some are converted into jeans. A firm in New York City uses a fabric blend of cotton and recycled brown beer bottles to produce what they call "eco-swag jeans" – pants perfectly fit for crazed but decidedly wealthy (they go for $350 a pair), country club environmentalist. A few bottles become just another brick, that is bottle, in the wall. Maybe the best example is the monks of the Wat Pa Maha Chedi Kaew temple who built a complex of 20 buildings utilizing one million beer bottles in their construction. That’s a lot of drinking even for monks. Just think if they had turned all those bottles in for the deposit they could have paid for a real building. There’s money in depositing bottles, you know. California alone currently spends $50 million dollars a year to buy beer bottles and cans at the rate of 5cents each. Let’s see, at 5 cents a bottle divided into $50 million multiplied by all the beer I drank last year.... hey, that's a lot more than a person gets paid being a beer writer. I was ready to continue my research but had exhausted both my budget and myself. It was time to relax and have a beer. Fortunately, the things I learned in my pilot study gave me the wisdom of what to do with my bottle after finishing it while preserving my anonymity from some recycling detective or garbage anthropologist. Just make it into a lamp. click to contact vince |
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