The Rant & Rage: Enviro-trash yuppie scum

I enjoy nature and therefore am doing my part to help out the good ol’ environment. I have been known to compost, I use mass transit and I don’t recycle my coffee cups.

That’s right, I do not recycle my coffee cups, and I will needlessly chop down a tree while burning a gallon of gasoline in front of the next enviro-hippy prick that self-righteously lectures me, insinuating how much of an ass I am for throwing away a coffee cup!

Get this straight: You cannot recycle coffee cups. They are constructed using a plastic lining that recycling companies cannot separate. Therefore, they cannot reuse the paper. Not to mention the glue and other materials involved. The plastic top, that’s OK, but the cup, forget about it. You cannot compost most of them either.

Don’t take my word for it: Metro Recycling, the folks who manage our recycling programs in the Portland area, clearly state this fact on their Web site. There’s plenty of crap to throw in that big, blue curbside box—just not coffee cups or most paper cups in general for that matter.

While we’re at it, forget about those boxes used in your freezer, pet food bags and any plastic-paper hybrid mail envelopes. Can’t recycle those either.

Like a false prophet of sustainability spreading the word of coffee cup recycling, all you are doing is pissing off some guy in a waste management company who has to rummage through all your crap just to pick out the cups. 

If you really want to do the right thing, use a portable coffee mug or a thermos. There is nothing to throw away and most baristas will fill it up for you, sometimes for a cheaper price.

But there are times when you’ve only had three cups so far that day, and you really need that fourth jolt to get you through to noon. This happens to me all the time. I am already aggravated from having to deal with the bullshit of using three different languages to describe what size I want, and then some yuppie scum has to run up as I am throwing it away saying “oh no no, you need to recycle that.”

You make being environmentally conscious so annoying while giving in to any green trend that comes your way. At this point, anyone could sell you shit in a box while marketing it as green. Most people would probably jump right into being more environmentally conscientious if they didn’t have a bunch of sheeple spouting off angered bitch fits to set the example.

You’re the same Einsteins who told all of us years ago that we should be drinking bottled water because it’s so much better than tap water. Yeah, until you figured out where all your bottles were going. And now, we are supposed to use metal bottles, filling them up with (get this) tap water. Way to go, yuppie green heads!  Decades of alternative water options just to turn around and reinvent the canteen.

But I digress. There have been some recycling programs, such as in Seattle, Wash., where they are attempting to tackle this coffee cup conundrum. Currently in Seattle, you can put your coffee cups in the recycling, but they have to be very clean, and any fancy takes on the cups, such as foam covering, do not qualify.

So the next time you want to lecture strangers, or your friends, on the wide world of sustainable green thought, remember this: The most environmentally conscientious thing you can do is be educated.