Feel-Good Follow-Up Filter

May 20, 2007 12:11 PM

A few weeks ago, I posted a question about our mountains of returnable bottles. Just thought I'd mention the outcome...two days after my post, we found a flyer attached to our doorknob. The local high school was collecting returnables as part of a fund-raiser for a student whose house had burned down. We hauled our many (many!) bags of bottles out to the curb as directed. We weren't there when they were collected, but a few days later our next-door neighbor caught me outside and mentioned that he'd been present when the kids came around to collect the bottles, and one of them yelled "Hey, jackpot!" to the others when they hit our curb. No particular point of this post, I guess, other than it was somewhat serendipitous timing that I had all our bottles bagged and had just posed the question as to what the heck to do with them.
posted by Oriole Adams to MetaFilter-Related at 12:11 PM (29 comments total)

Cool.
posted by ThePinkSuperhero at 12:14 PM on May 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

This kind of update is probably better posted in the still open thread.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 12:19 PM on May 20, 2007

That's cool. Make sure you post this in the still open thread so that people who read it via the My Comments feature will be sure to see it.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 12:25 PM on May 20, 2007

Please post pics of the house made out of bottles when it's finished. kthx.
posted by mullacc at 1:27 PM on May 20, 2007 [3 favorites]

Bottle House.
posted by loquacious at 1:32 PM on May 20, 2007

question as to what the heck to do with them.

one generally returns them. see, that's why they are called returnable. of course, giving them to a good cause is also fine. mind-boggling that in this day and age you didn't need to ask a website what to do after all.
posted by quonsar at 3:16 PM on May 20, 2007 [1 favorite]

one generally returns them

Well that's not very interesting.
posted by ryanrs at 3:33 PM on May 20, 2007

If they were returned then OA wouldn't have been able to contribute to that great cause!

Way to go Oriole Adams.
posted by snsranch at 6:03 PM on May 20, 2007

"Bill Clinton's flight was the latest and most spectacular of a string of Triangle-area emu escapes that ended in death."

That's my favorite line from a link in a deleted thread this week.
I coulda started another MeTa thread, but it's not really warranted. So I piggybacked your half-interesting MeTa post. Hope that's cool.

"mind-boggling that in this day and age you didn't need to ask a website what to do after all."

You don't need to ask a website— you need to ask a Web 2.0 site. Returnr.com, for all your Michigan carbonated beverage returnable social networking ajax/ruby needs.
posted by klangklangston at 7:52 PM on May 20, 2007

This makes me sad that, in my state, bottles are not returnable, except as general recycling waste :-(
posted by dg at 8:46 PM on May 20, 2007

DG, in the future - not the present future, but the upcoming future future - all those so-called garbage dumps are going to be mined for all there worth.

In fact, a word of advice.

Were any penny-stock, openly-traded company out there buying up supposedly undesirable garbage fills, why, I would direct a buck or two in each of them.

Think of it as the "everything beneath us must emerge" approach to recycling. Or garbage mining.
posted by humannaire at 9:54 PM on May 20, 2007

Were any penny-stock, openly-traded company out there buying up supposedly undesirable garbage fills, why, I would direct a buck or two in each of them.

By buying garbage fills, the firm would be establishing itself as a potentially responsible party (or PRP, as they are uncreatively abbreviated) under EPA guidelines, and thus all of its assets would be at risk should it find itself subject to a claim or penalty.

This is why such a business is likely not to be structured as a traditional corporation, but rather as a series of limited partnerships. Therefore, I'd be very surprised if the "company" were to trade on an exchange. You're best off raising a few million, calling Blackstone or KKR, and seeing what's going around these days.

Just, you know, FYI.
posted by Kwantsar at 11:37 PM on May 20, 2007

A company I was working for had some returnable bottles that we didn't know what to do with. We asked a local church if they would like to take the bottles to redeem them for the deposit. They said they were interested in the donation, but didn't have anyone to return the bottles themselves.

So I brought the bottles in, got the deposit back, and then dropped an envelope full of cash marked "Redemption Money" off at the church.
posted by ODiV at 12:27 AM on May 21, 2007

No particular point of this post, I guess...

You were this close.
posted by prostyle at 5:56 AM on May 21, 2007

The evil of banality.
posted by Divine_Wino at 8:35 AM on May 21, 2007

Frankly I'm glad y'all're so rich you don't need to reurn your returnable bottles. In big cities you don't have to, there are people who spend all day going all over with shopping carts collecting unwanting bottles and cans so they can get money for returning them; I call then "recyclers" but Society calls them "lazy bums."

And ODiV, you're at the borderline of "Sweet" and "Stupid." I guess you're rich too. huh?
posted by davy at 10:09 AM on May 21, 2007

WTF davy?
posted by klangklangston at 10:23 AM on May 21, 2007

Jesus Christ, davy, would you cut it out? Between this and the threads-spanning languagehat jag you've been really prickly lately.
posted by cortex (staff) at 10:24 AM on May 21, 2007

Frankly I'm glad y'all're so rich you don't need to reurn your returnable bottles. In big cities you don't have to, there are people who spend all day going all over with shopping carts collecting unwanting bottles and cans so they can get money for returning them; I call then "recyclers" but Society calls them "lazy bums."

I don't know who you think you're "schooling" with this, but it sounds bitchy and what ODIV did sounds nice. I'm glad I'm not homeless too, can we move on?
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 10:28 AM on May 21, 2007

In the first case I was making a general-purpose sarcastic aside on what "Society" calls those people, and in the second place I was picking on ODiV for no good reason (for that I apologize). I didn't mean to be really "prickly."

I myself live in a place where they don't do Return Deposit, and since I don't need the money from recycling aluminum enough to shlepp my empties clear across town I leave them out by the alley where the Recyclers can easily find them. IMHO anybody who needs the money bad enough to tramp the alleys like that is welcome to it, it strikes me as an awful lot of walking for a few measly cents. Which is why I took the chance to get sarcastic at "Society" for calling them "lazy bums," see. Besides that, I've met a few Recyclers around here and they seem like decent people; this one old guy has the sweetest dog who seems to want nothing more in all the world than to follow him up one alley and down the next. (He must wind up doing okay with all his industriousness because the dog's not starving or unhealthy-looking either.)

Anyway. There's no real need for anybody to get oversensitive, defensive or prickly, eh?
posted by davy at 11:16 AM on May 21, 2007

By the way, is there a way to see if one's post or comment has been flagged, what's been flagged as, and how many times? It might be beneficial or at least interesting for me to know such things. (I'm not asking to see who finds what I say so noteworthy; sometimes it's obvious.)
posted by davy at 11:26 AM on May 21, 2007

By the way, is there a way to see if one's post or comment has been flagged, what's been flagged as, and how many times?

No. If you don't want people to get defensive please consider not calling them stupid for no reason.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 11:28 AM on May 21, 2007

When will "society" learn, dammit, when?
posted by Divine_Wino at 12:10 PM on May 21, 2007

"Bill Clinton's flight was the latest and most spectacular of a string of Triangle-area emu escapes that ended in death."

klangklangston, incidentally, when it comes to headlines featured recently featured on Fark I also like imagining this police report one FPPd: "A man on Westwood Place said his girlfriend was beating a miniature Chihuahua with a spatula."
posted by Firas at 1:18 PM on May 21, 2007 [1 favorite]

I wasn't thinking of ODiV when I asked about flagging. But whatever. No sense explaining that either.

And Divine_Wino, it's too bad I can't draw well enough to cartoon, that'd be a great caption.
posted by davy at 1:48 PM on May 21, 2007

Maybe you should try and find an appropriate picture of an amusing cat.
posted by h00py at 6:27 PM on May 21, 2007

I wasn't telling the story to build myself up; apologies if it came out that way. The thread just reminded me of the story and I just thought the redemption pun was too good to pass up.
posted by ODiV at 8:58 PM on May 21, 2007

"redemption pun"

Which I totaly missed. Was it any good?
posted by davy at 9:43 AM on May 22, 2007

Which I totaly missed. Was it any good?

I think so. He said "I brought the bottles in, got the deposit back, and then dropped an envelope full of cash marked "Redemption Money" off at the church." [emphasis mine]
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 9:46 AM on May 22, 2007