North Berkeley resident Rann Eround found herself stranded in West Berkeley when her EV battery was depleted after a frustrating odyssey to recycle some household batteries she had collected.
Writing on NextDoor, Eround explained what happened.
“I try to be a responsible person. Really – I rinse out my recyclables and only water my garden in the very early mornings. But I was almost undone trying to recycle batteries.
I read the materials preparation page on the Berkeley Recycles website, then went to the recycling place at 2nd and Gilman. I was told I could not recycle them there – I had to go the Transfer Station next door and wait in line. After waiting in line for what felt like eternity, the nice guy at the transfer station said they don’t take batteries – I’d need to go to the recycling center.”
The Bunion’s research team has conducted a longitudinal analysis of wait times at the transfer station and they are brutal. Trucks offloading construction and yard waste can idle for as long as three hours before entering.
The waits are so long that local builders have organized a Transfer Station Book Club so that the time spent isn’t completely wasted. The Club President requested anonymity so as not to provoke the ire of the city’s planning department and shared the group’s reading list. “We finished Anna Karenina in less than two weeks using only the Transfer Station wait times. It’s a little on the nose, but next up is Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time. Some guys are going to tackle it in the French original after we did a Duolinguo course together while waiting in line. There’s a lot of excitement about Proust’s use of the imperfect subjunctive verb tense. It’s almost never used and yet we hear that it captures the air of uncertainty – a time outside of time – that is the truth of our community.”
“Another group learned Spanish and want to take on Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years Of Solitude” he continued. “Some of the other guys are preparing for a script-in-hand reading of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in both French and English. [Beckett wrote in both.] The passage of time is a recurring theme for us as the hours on line creep by.”
Ordinary citizens like Eround have no way to know that entering the Transfer Station can be such an edifying ordeal. And in her case, unfortunately, the hours spent drawing down her EV battery proved to be pointless.
Eround explains: “ Back to the recycling center where the third person I asked took me to a little unmarked area under a corrugated roof and behind a curtain where hazardous waste could be processed.”
“Finally!”
“Then I saw that my batteries needed to be separated into lithium and alkaline piles which I hadn’t done.”
Defeated, Eround began her retreat to her North Berkeley enclave, but by then her EV battery was depleted and she found herself stranded near a homeless encampment that she described as “really sketchy.”
“I called for a tow, but AAA had trouble finding a driver willing to enter that area for safety reasons. Apparently there have been cases of tow trucks needing to be rescued themselves after plunging into potholes. One was so big that some homeless people were playing pickle ball inside.”
After reaching her home hours later, Eround posted her ordeal on NextDoor. Neighbors advised her to drive her batteries to El Cerrito next time. “It’s recycling paradise” commented one, garnering dozens of likes from other community members.
Eround admits to being conflicted about this news. “I have an EV, so a drive to recycle in El Cerrito is carbon neutral, I guess. But what about my neighbors with ICE vehicles ? Driving that distance to recycle makes no sense from an environmental stand point.”
Inspired by the Transfer Station Book Club and her time in the homeless encampment that “makes a third world favela look like Norway,” Eround plans to use those El Cerrito drives to listen to audiobooks. “Love in the Time of Cholera seems like a fitting choice,” she wrote.