Recycling in Downtown Princeton--No Space To Place

Behind the beloved Princeton Public Library is the somewhat less beloved parking garage. It's very useful, but perhaps due to it's being located in Princeton, it has more idiosyncrasies than the average parking garage. If Princeton drivers are above average, some credit must go to the practice we get in doing hairpin turns while entering the garage from the north side. Even a slight miscalculation will expose the greenhorn, car angled badly askew as the befuddled driver has no choice but to climb out to get a ticket.

Once in, spiraling upward in what should ultimately be a successful search for a parking space, you can contemplate the garage's brief but checkered history. Built on Spring Street, the garage's utility was compromised early on when a historic spring-fed pond oozed up from below to hold the garage basement hostage for an extended period.

When you return for your car, you may interact with the ticket machine, whose voice has a tone that to me sounds sexually ambivalent--not surprising in a machine.

Very rarely, you may pull out of the garage only to find yourself trapped by a Waste Management truck emptying recyclables. This happened to me recently, and I decided to use the wait time to learn more about the recycling situation downtown. Many of the merchants packed into the buildings downtown have very limited room in back to store recyclables. This relatively new parking garage has unfortunately continued that tradition, with very limited space allocated to storing recyclables generated both by the library and the Witherspoon Grill. When the few rollout bins for foodwaste get filled, employees dump foodwaste in the rollout bins for recyclables, thereby contaminating the recyclables. Overflows of recyclables, in turn, likely get thrown in the trash compactor, from whence they head to the landfill.

The recurrent theme here, with flooded basements, hairpin turns and cramped recycling space, is the importance of taking nature and human nature into account, whether in the design of buildings or of recycling programs. It's good news, though, that the Witherspoon Grill is composting food waste. All of the library cafe's paper waste could be added in, but for the lack of space.