In udder news

The bottle on the left is an Ozarka eight-ounce bottle of fluoridated spring water. It has a "non-removable child-safe twist-cap". The cap is not recyclable, although the bottle is. The only way to remove the cap is to crush the bottle, which also means you can't refill the bottle with the fluoridated water from your own tap! Why does the cap need to be child-safe and non-removable if the bottle just contains water? Is it so the child doesn't swallow the cap? If so, someone needs to be paying closer attention to that child! Why are we so afraid of our tap water that we would spend $2.99 for sixty-four ounces of fluoridated Ozarka in eight difficult to recycle bottles?

I've checked with my recycling experts, and they report that the bottle crusher machine at the recycling plant causes the caps to pop off the bottles so they can be sorted out of the recycling stream. I bet the Cub Scout dens that tour the Allied Waste’s Material Recycling Facility in east Plano will love that part of the show! Taking my oldest son's scout group on that field trip was a riot. It was really loud. It was smashing and crushing. It had big machines. If it had shooting, the boys would have swooned with rapture. And now I find out about this bottle crusher that pops the caps off bottles making them shoot around. How fabulous is that? Where can we get the video???

Just an aside here. We took the Tiger Cubs on a tour behind the scenes at the grocery store. Then we stood out in the January Oklahoma wind feeding aluminum cans into the Golden Goat Can Bank, listening to the cans clunk down the chutes to the crusher, and waiting for coins to shoot out. This was also on the scout top ten list of favorites, but lacked the visual impact of the recycling plant.

The bottle on the right is also an Ozarka bottle--an eleven-ounce Aquapod that resembles a Hanna-Barbera cartoon rocket. I saved mine from volunteering at the Half marathon last weekend, washed them, and have been reusing them in my brown bag school lunches. One of the preschoolers informed me it looks "just like a cow's penis." Gack! Nevermind that cows...bulls...I don't want to explain gender differences to a three year old at lunchtime!

I hope the student really meant a cow's udder. One of the elementary students explained that we get milk from a cow by "pulling the strings". Kind of a reverse marionette, I guess.

© 2007 Nancy L. Ruder