The mantra of many that want to reduce waste and help the environment is reduce, reuse, recycle and in that order. So today I tried to do the second step of reusing by donating some of my old stuff to Goodwill. I went to Goodwill‘s Miramar landfill location as it was the closest location to me (less than 10 minutes away). I had a bunch of stuff to donate including a monitor, a sewing machine, an old laptop, old video camera, old cell phones, clothes, etc. The guy at the station informed me that they couldn’t accept anything with a plug on it at that location because they had a deal with the “recycling center” next door. Which to me meant that the recycling center wanted the stuff as it charges to recycle things like monitor whereas Goodwill just takes it. It would seem that they don’t adhere to the same mantra that I do and want me to skip the reuse step and go right to recycle.
In the end, I had to drive an extra 15 minutes up the road to their Sorrento Valley location to donate the rest of my stuff. This makes no sense to me as Goodwill takes all their stuff and resells it if it is in sellable condition. What a waste of extra time and gas to do the right thing.