Is Berkeley's Recycling Service a Leader or Laggard?

I've made a surprising discovery: The city of Berkeley thinks "Manchild in the Promised Land" is trash.

But before I get ahead of myself, let me discuss a broader topic. If Berkeley is so renowned for its environmental stewardship, why is its recycling program so frustrating?

Back in San Francisco, you could recycle nearly everything — including most every kind of plastic — and you never had to sort. Cardboard, glass, plastic and paper all went into the same container. The convenience encouraged more people to recycle, helping the city reclaim more than three-quarters of the waste it generates. (The goal is to reach 100 percent by 2020.)

Now that we've moved to Berkeley, we have to sort again. The whole thing feels so 1990s. Worse, Berkeley doesn't accept certain kind of plastics, like yogurt containers, even though San Francisco did so happily.

Now, you may just think it's because Berkeley lacks the resources of San Francisco. Maybe that's part of the problem, but it mostly appears to be born out of environmental asceticism. Berkeley thinks most plastic recycling is bogus and would prefer to abstain entirely.

Berkeley's split carts require sorting.

You see, plastic can't be recycled the same way aluminum or glass can. Plastic bottles aren't typically turned into new bottles. At best, they're reused in construction materials and other products. Because of the plastic prejudice, it was a big deal when Berkeley even began accepting plastic soda bottles in 2000 (something that seems like a baseline offering for any recycling program).

If you visit the website of Berkeley's Ecology Center (the organization that handles recycling), the message is clear: Don't buy plastic. But in real life, it's pretty hard to avoid it in certain products, such as yogurt. And if San Francisco has figured out a solution for these plastics, why can't Berkeley?

I was having these thoughts one morning while sorting items in our recycling bin. That's when I made my discovery. One of the items they recommend pulping is Claude Brown's "Manchild in the Promised Land."

Egg cartons, literary classics

Odd. Wouldn't it be better to use a trashy novel as an example of something to recycle. Any used-book shop in Berkeley would gladly buy back a copy of "Manchild" — especially the 1960s vintage paperback pictured on the bin. We should reuse before recycling, no?

It's also one of the most frequently banned books, because of its offensive language and frank descriptions of Harlem life in the 1940s and '50s. So of all the books for Berkeley to trash, this was a poor choice.