Last week was Earth Week, a time set aside to focus attention on the environment and a chance for major retail chains to have Green Sales. It was also the week I took a load of cardboard to the local recycling facility.

To be honest, my reason for going was less out of concern for the planet and more out of a desire to clean out my garage.
I am still not sure how all this corrugated cardboard got here, but when the towering stack of old boxes fell over on top of me one Saturday morning, I said enough was enough.

Thus began a strange and bizarre adventure that demonstrated why recycling efforts do not work, and why we have a long way to go to become eco-friendly.

In Indianapolis, however, you cannot just throw old cardboard away. It must be cut into 3-foot sections and bundled or the trash collectors leave the boxes at the curb where they will blow into your neighbor’s yard. Rural folks can burn this stuff or bury it, but folks in town do not have that option. My option was to take it to the recycling facility. Finding this facility was the first challenge. It was located in the heart of an industrial park, crisscrossed by railroad tracks, and dominated by loading docks and tanker truck filling terminals.

The recycling center looked like it needed to be recycled. The cavernous structure was covered in mostly rusted corrugated metal with a large banner at the top that read “We Buy Scrap Metal.”
Surrounding the building was a large amount of heavy equipment including cranes, forklifts, and bulldozers - all covered in a thick layer of dirt. There were several large openings on each side of the building each with a number. Trucks, cars and people were going in and out of these openings depositing a bewildering variety of junk.
We first had to check in at the scale house. Here I was asked what I had to recycle. “Cardboard,” I said gesturing to the back end of my car crammed with boxes. I was handed a ticket and told to go to door 7.

At door 7, I was greeted by a man in a hardhat and orange vest. “What do you have?” he asked. “Cardboard,” I said again. He instructed me to back my car into the dark recess beyond door 7. He then jumped on a forklift and began pushing a massive mountain of scrap metal out of the way to make room. The noise it made was horrendous, like a million nails on a blackboard.
After unloading, I was told to return to the scale house to collect my payment. Payment? You mean, someone was actually going to pay me to take the junk out of my garage? When I returned to the scale I discovered that Earth Week was a bad week to recycle. The line was very long.

There were luxury cars filled with aluminum cans, pickup trucks held together with duct tape and filled with old water heaters, and there were large dump trucks and semi trucks filled with tons of wire and unrecognizable chunks of metal. The line moved very slowly.
When I finally reached the window, I was told I had recycled 60 pounds of cardboard. I was filled with a momentary flush of eco-satisfaction, which quickly vanished when I was told the minimum to receive a check was 100 pounds. I was then handed a slip of paper with a bar code and told to go back into the building and find the ATM. There I would receive cash for my contribution toward a saving the planet.

Walking through a recycling plant is truly a surrealistic experience. Both the variety of stuff and the sheer volume of it are overwhelming.

There were giant bins of chrome wheels from a thousand sports cars. Another bin I peered into held thousands of faucets from kitchens and bathrooms. There were giant cubes of crushed aluminum cans stacked several stories high.

Large cranes hoisted huge tangles of copper wire into railroad cars. A mountain of abandoned bicycle parts towered over me. The noise was cacophonous; you had to shout to make yourself heard. Imagine stepping on the tails of a billion cats all at once.
The ATM turned out to be a barcode reader hanging on a wall. When I scanned my ticket, a door opened and my cash reward was presented: $2. Driving home, I estimated I had used about $2 worth of gas to get to and from the facility. The endeavor had taken about an hour.

Recycling is one of those ideas that sounds good but falls far short in application. Most Americans do not recycle because it is it inconvenient and expensive. Some products including paper and aluminum have fairly high rates of recycling. But ever try and recycle a television, a computer or a propane tank?

The United States is the No. 1 trash-producing country in the world at 1,609 pounds per person per year This is due primarily to the kind of products we use. Out of every $10 spent buying things, $1 (10 percent) goes for packaging that is thrown away. Packaging represents about 65 percent of household trash.

My trip to the recycling plant impressed upon me the inefficiency of recycling as well as the ugly side of what happens when we throw stuff away. For recycling to be effective, it must be easy and have an incentive.

Some retailers have begun offering discounts on new products when you bring the old one back. This would encourage people to recycle and should be something more green-minded stores should adopt. If recycling is so great, then the environmentalists who preach it need to find a ways to make it work.

The views and opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and not necessarily those of Farm World. Readers with comments for Gary Truitt may write to him in care of this publication.