My trip to the Resource Recovery Facility and Recycling Center

[UPDATE: If you Google “santa cruz dump” then you find this post.  Funny how that works.]

First of all, it’s a dump.

Seriously.

What is this “Resource Recovery Facility and Recycling Center” you speak of, city of Santa Cruz?

Do you have any idea how difficult it was to use teh Internets to figure out where the heck to find the dump?

A quick fix: throw some meta keywords in the header code for that page, guys. Maybe something like “santa cruz dump,” which is what any sane person types into a search engine to find the thing.

That said, the dump was great. I didn’t mind paying ten bucks to drop off the old futon mattress and a long-dead vacuum cleaner. It made me feel like I was using a service, which is really what it is. As a kid in Miami unincorporated Northeast Dade County, the dump was, really, just a big ugly pile, and anyone could pull up and toss cans of paint thinner or rolled-up carpets into the mix without much fuss.

The, uh, resource recovery facility just north of Santa Cruz on Hwy. 1 was already crunching and smashing like clockwork when I stopped by at about 8:30 this morning.

Lots of huge bins for every possible recyclable, neat crushed 8-foot-tall cubes of cans and cardboard, and a dude in a big crane-claw thingie scooping up all the crap tossed by civilians like myself onto a staging area.

Smart.