Recycling Gone Wrong

Posted on February 19th, 2006 Mitch Milam  Print No comments

So I'm trying to be a good corporate citizen of the planet and have joined the recycle movement here in Coppell, Texas.

A couple weeks ago, I finally emptied out one of those industrial-sized bottles of Dawn dishwashing soap and I decided that I had to clean out the soap remnants before I could chunk it into my recycle bin.

Well, I am assuming you realize that when you attempt to wash away soap, what it does is to create lots and lots of bubbles.  Mostly because, uh, that is its job. 

I was attempting to debubble the bottle when I got tired of the rinse-repeat cycle.  I figure there is a break even point between saving the planet from yet another plastic bottle thrown in the landfill vs. wasting 10 gallons of fresh water that another human could be using.

Anyway, I hit upon what I thought was a brilliant idea.  I would just hold the mouth of the bottle tightly to the faucet and not let any of the bubbles escape.  It would fill up with water and I could get back to more important things – like a nap or something.

This is probably the point where I need to mention that I never took any physics courses.

I think the average municiple water system has something like 17 pounds per square inch ( PSI ) of pressure.  Do you know what happened when the contents of that Dawn bottle hit 17.1 PSI?

It blowed up.

Well actually, it was more like a volcano, so I guess the technical term is: erupted.

Very much so.  Like, all over my kitchen so.  Minus the part that was obsorbed by my face, of course.

So as I am standing in the middle of what can only be described as "a mess," the only thing I could think of was the fact that I really needed to clean the kitchen anyway.

Dumbass.

Meanderings

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