For a number of years, a few of us used to do freelance event planning and special projects gigs for the City of Chicago, working out of various city buildings, including the Cultural Center in the Loop (which, inside, looks like the Wizard’s Palace in the Emerald City of Oz…so check it out the next time you’re in our city).

Chicago is a very “Green Police” kind of town, with the Mayor offering carrots and sticks to get every new building constructed with green materials.  Some of this stuff we agree with wholeheartedly…like the rooftop gardens the Mayor demands on buildings.  We love those.  They are gorgeous.  They use up rain water.  They attract birds and other animals we love.  And they decrease the damage done by concrete urban heat islands in cities like Chicago.  Love rooftop gardens.

But, we think a lot of the other “Green Police” stuff is just garbage.

Especially when it comes to, well, garbage.

In Chicago, as noted, we worked in at least four different city buildings since 2005.  In all of those the SAME THING happened with all the “recycling”:  late at night, when all the garbage was taken away, it was dumped into one big dumpster on its way to a landfill.  During the daytime, when people were watching, there were “Green Policemen” in all the offices who would scold you for throwing an empty pop can into the trash…and these green shirts would embarrass people in meetings recounting tales of spotting them using styrofoam cups or whatever…but then, at night, the blue “recyclables” garbage and the regular “yucky” garbage was all dumped into the same giant containers by the cleaning staff.

There was only one dumpster outside the building, where all the garbage went to.

So, what was the point in the “green shirts” harassing everyone to separate the recyclables from the regular garbage?  It seems like all that haranguing was wasted energy, if all the garbage just ends up in the same place anyway.

Someone once tried to tell us that the garbage, after it was collected from the dumpster, was taken somewhere, magical, where it was separated into recyclable and non-recyclable pieces.

To us, that sounds like “the farm” parents tell their children various pets went to live at, when they got too sick or old.  That “farm” might be one exit before the “recycling plant” where all those bags of trash are separated out and neatly recycled so all the Leftists can sleep soundly on their hemp mattresses under their cruelty-free non-down down covers.