Joe Bob Saves The Planet

            Joe Bob's America - 9/21/21

By Joe Bob Briggs

    NEW YORK—People ask me all the time, “How do you do it, Joe Bob? How did you achieve that negative-27,000 environmental footprint?”

    Easy. I recycle everything. I once recycled a One-Oh-Eight Freightliner dump truck with a flat-leaf spring suspension and a stand-up right-hand drive that I inherited from Chubb Fricke when he went to jail for getting drunk in San Diego and stealing a penguin from SeaWorld.

    But for day-to-day recycling, I’m gonna give you the foolproof Joe Bob Briggs Guide to Loving the Earth. If you follow these 21 easy steps, you won’t just be loving the earth, you’ll be having kinky sex with the earth. Other planets will be asking you for your phone number.

    First off, you’re gonna need two dozen 55-gallon whiskey barrels, the kind used for Wild Turkey, then reused for Macallan single malt, then frequently used to dispose of dead bodies.

    We’re gonna arrange our whiskey barrels into four groups—plastic, paper, metal and glass—and then we’re gonna put a single slime bucket next to each group. The slime bucket is for stuff you can’t categorize, like egg cartons.

    What the fuck do they make egg cartons out of? Somebody please tell me. It’s not paper, it’s not cardboard, it’s not plastic, it’s some kind of spongy white Frankenbucket substance that’s cranked out through a 3D printer fed with squirrel manure.

    And yet, I will recycle it. Do not challenge me. I have recycled machine-gun-toting members of the Medellin cartel.

    Okay, let’s start with plastic. You’re gonna take seven barrels and label them as follows:

    Styrofoam Coffee Cups: We use 24 trillion of these a year, and everyone believes they can’t be recycled. We’re gonna recycle these mothers anyway. We’re gonna smush em down into that barrel, tens of thousands of Styrofoam coffee cups in a single barrel, until that foam polystyrene becomes rigid polystyrene. They’re going right in with the plastic razors, CD cases, license plate frames, and Uber Eats utensils. America uses 2.5 million plastic bottles per hour, and I’m determined to increase that pace by proving that every Poland Spring container can become yet another Poland Spring container if we just shovel this stuff back into the Plastic Mash-up Factory.

    Okay, let’s move on.

    High-Density Polystyrene: This is your Lysol bottle, your Oreo tray, and your Tide dispenser. And we’re gonna make lawn chairs out of em.

    Polyvinyl Chloride: This is all that stuff you thought was leather when you bought it but turned out to be made out of kitchen linoleum. We’re gonna use it to make traffic cones for use in midwestern cities that maxed out their budget subsidizing the B-B gun factory.

    Polypropylene: Tic Tac boxes, Tupperware, prescription drug containers, beer coolers, and those little trash cans that you kick across the room in motels. This is stuff that is made to last. But it won’t. We’ll mash that molded deck chair into oatmeal residue.

    Polyethylene: This is virtually everything plastic that you use in your daily life, from Head and Shoulders bottles to all those quilts they sell at Family Dollar—those things are 110 percent petrochemical-based, which is why we have heat-stroke victims in January. Here’s the part you’re gonna love, though. We’re gonna compact all that stuff and feed it to the Greater Wax Moth, an ugly little monster that normally feeds on beehives. The Chinese have determined that these creatures can live on polyethylene, and that means that it’s only a matter of time before Michael Bay makes the movie about China using its overwhelming polyethylene stockpile to breed monster Wax Moths that attack en masse and eat their way through redneck packing plants all over the South.

    Okay, what else we got here?

    Polyvinyl Chloride: Sure that shower curtain is nasty around the edges, but we’re gonna chew it up anyway.

    Polytetrafluoroethylene: Who said you can’t recycle pizza boxes or microwave popcorn bags? Teflon has been certified “indestructible” by three professional wrestling organizations that tried to use it in stunts, which is why DuPont keeps making it, but we’re gonna bring in a Nordberg C-Series truck-mounted pounding machine, “The Jaw Crusher,” and we’re not gonna stop until every non-stick skillet and saucepan resembles the remains of Jimmy Hoffa.

    Okay, let’s move on to metal. We’re gonna go with nine barrels for metal. Label them as follows:

    Iron

    Copper

    Brass

    Aluminum

    Zinc

    Magnesium

    Tin

    Nickel

    Lead

    If you have children in the house, put them in charge of Aluminum. Aluminum is no fun for adults, because anything made of aluminum can become the same thing made of aluminum. It’s just infinite clean recycling, like Groundhog Day. Your three-year-old can handle that.

    If you have unwanted children in the house, put them in charge of Lead.

    Okay, so what you will quickly realize is that you probably can’t tell the difference between Tin, Nickel, Magnesium, and Zinc. This is why we have junkyards named after vicious animals. Throw that stuff in the back of a Dodge Mega Cab RAM 3500 and truck it over to the stockyards and make Cletis give you 35 bucks for it.

    Next we have your paper. Write this down:

    Corrugated

    Newspaper

    Slick Paper (but don’t throw out your old Playboys, those things can fetch huge numbers at any East Texas swap meet)

    Paper with Chili Sauce on it or any related Slimy Substance

    Guess what? You just saved eleven trees last year, so take your chainsaw and go claim those, you can put em in your woodshop and make tree-stump furniture.

    Finally we have Glass and Compost.

    Glass is glass. Throw the Pyrex bowls right in there with the Jim Beam bottles and the windshield from the Dodge Dart that’s been up on blocks since 1967. You’re gonna make a Colonial cosplaying glass-blower at Williamsburg very happy.

    And finally, Compost is everything you didn’t finish eating last night, plus everything you did finish eating last night. Let’s not go there. But you can sell it to health food chains to fertilize scallions.

    Now wasn’t that easy? Just don’t mislabel the barrel or the Environmental Police in Burlington, Vermont, will charge you a 45-dollar fine.

    I will now channel Zelda Rubinstein.

    This planet is CLEAN.