A Holiday Recycling Tale

“The Grinch hated recycling especially during holiday season.
Now please don’t ask why. No one quite knows the reason.
It could be a paper cut once caused him great pain.
It could be holiday junk mail drove him insane.

But I think that the most likely reason of all
May have been that his recycling bin was two sizes too small.
Whatever the reason, the junk mail or his small bin,
The Grinch chose to make everyone more miserable than him.

I won’t pre-rinse; I’ll make my recycling smell.
I’ll hide garbage in my leaves so no one can tell.
I’ll put out my papers on days when it rains.
I’ll add in some food waste to cause dirty stains.

I’ll recycle all plastics when only some are accepted.
I’ll do whatever I want. Who cares if I’m corrected?
I’ll throw in some light bulbs, crystal and glass panes.
They say “glass containers” but they’re really all the same.

And sometimes I’ll simply throw my recycling away.
After all, who is it hurting, if I miss one day?
The collectors struggled to recycle what they could.
But the Grinch’s recyclables were simply no good.

Left out on the curb, so full of contamination,
The overflowing bin sometimes littered. Oh, the abomination!
Week after week, the Grinch called the collectors the fools.
When week after week, he himself, broke the rules.

Then one day the Grinch happened to see
That the landfill was filling as fast as could be.
And the Grinch began to ponder the meaning of this
“In a landfill, how long would his items exist?”

Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before.
Maybe recycling, he thought, isn’t really a chore.
Maybe recycling, he thought, means a little bit more.

In a landfill, the waste items are good for no one
But in recycling, waste items create jobs and so on.
It is good to the earth and good for the community
And he thought that if everyone would recycle in unity
And buy recycled goods when they shopped at the store
And recycle correctly and recycle more…

Then maybe, perhaps we could make recycling pay
What happened then? Well in Colorado they say
That the Grinch’s small brain grew three sizes that day.

And the minute his mind wasn’t feeling so maniacal,
He thought of more ways and more reasons to recycle.
And he spread these words to his neighbors and kin:
Recycle correctly and recycle more in your recycling bin.

And to prove that he was dedicated to completing the caper
He himself, the Grinch switched to recycled-content paper.”