Monday, March 17, 2003

Recycle!
Reuters amuses with Recycler Traded Cans for Booze?
A Los Angeles recycler that catered to homeless alcoholics by exchanging the bottles and cans they dug out of people's trash for coupons for a nearby liquor store has been shut down as a nuisance, city officials said on Friday.
...
"The story here sounds like fiction, but it is fact," Delgadillo said. "The concept of protecting the environment became hideously distorted as transients were given coupons for a liquor store instead of money for their cans and bottles."

Authorities initially had some trouble shutting down the site because no Los Angeles city ordinance prohibits exchanging recyclable items for coupons. "It's okay to give out coupons but they were only for use at the liquor store," Eric Moses, a spokesman for Delgadillo, said. "The allegation is that they weren't buying Ho-Hos (packaged snacks), they were buying 40 ouncers."
There's always a party pooper!