Pippa and Pauly had the day off from school for doll-owner-teacher conferences. It was cold and wet and snowy outdoors, so they were playing on the daybed in the workroom. The sun was playing peek-a-boo with the many snow clouds.
The dolls had been playing for only a few minutes, when they heard a noise from outside.
"What's that?" Pauly asked, jumping up to go look.
"It's trash day," Pippa replied, as she climbed up to the windowsill where Pauly was. "The trucks come every Thursday morning. Besides our trash, they'll pick up the yard waste and glass recycling (ree-SYK-ling) this week. Next week they pick up the other recycling along with next week's trash."
"What's recycling?" Pauly asked.
"That's stuff that can be used again," Pippa replied. "They grind it up or melt it or something and make new things out of it, I think."
"I've seen that truck before," Pauly said, when the truck came into view. "It comes by our house, too. I never knew what it was for."
The two friends watched from the window, as the truck pulled up to the trash container and the blue glass bin in front of the house. The Writer's family didn't have any yard waste this week, just regular trash and glass. As the dolls watched, the driver got out of the truck.
The driver walked over to the glass bin and picked it up. He dumped what was in the bin into a kind of opening on the side of the truck. Even from inside the house, the two dolls could hear a loud clanking and crashing.
"Some of the bottles and jars break when he does that," Pippa told her friend. "Mandy told me that's why they keep the glass separate from the other recycling. If it's broken, it's sharp, and it can cut your vinyl, but even broken glass can still be recycled. It doesn't matter, because they're going to melt it all down and make new bottles and things."
Pauly thought this was important to know. He wondered if it would hurt when your vinyl got cut and if it could be repaired.
"We separate our recycling here in the house," Pippa explained. "All the paper, plastic and metal cans that don't have a redemption (re-DEMP-shun) value get dumped together into one recycling bin and the glass all goes into another bin."
"What's re-redemption value?" Pauly asked hesitantly, because he was not sure if he was saying it right.
"That's if you paid something called a deposit," Pippa told him, "when you bought whatever came in the can. If you bring the can back, they give you the money back. It helps people remember to return the cans."
"When the recycling bins in our house are full," Pippa continued, "someone takes them out and puts the glass into that blue bin the driver just picked up and emptied into the truck, and the other recycling goes into that big blue container we have. Our recycling container looks like the trash container that's out there on the street, only it's bigger and a different color. They both have wheels built into them. The trash people will come and get our other recycling next week."
Pauly could remember seeing the big recycling container in front of the garage whenever he came to visit. He knew what it was, because it even said "RECYCLE CART" on the side.
"When is gets to wherever they take it," Pippa continued. "real human people look through it. They have to take out anything that doesn't belong and should have gone into the trash instead, because sometimes someone makes a mistake. Paper has to be clean, and not all plastic can be recycled where we live. They take that kind of stuff out."
"Paper gets ground up," Pippa told him. "Metal and plastic get melted, like the glass. Not together, of course. Then they can use all the stuff to make new things. The trash truck operates the same way as the recycling truck. It just gets what's in the other container. They use separate trucks so it doesn't get mixed together, after everyone worked hard to separate things correctly."
"In a little while," Pippa said, "that recycling truck will come back down the other side of the street. It will pick up the glass and yard waste from the people who live in the houses on that side of the street, and then the trash truck will come from up the street from up there, just like the recycling truck did. They always come from that direction when they're going to stop at our house, because they have to be close to the sidewalk our trash and recycling are on."
Pauly knew that all of the traffic came from that direction. It was the first thing he learned when he learned how to cross the street.
The dolls didn't have to wait long for the truck to come back. Soon they could hear it. It sounded like the same truck.
The truck stopped in front of the house across the street. Those human people had yard waste as well as glass. The dolls could hear the glass crashing into the place in the truck. They knew what the driver was doing, even though they couldn't see him, because they had seen him do it in front of Pippa's house. Then there was another noise––sort of a grinding sound––and the truck shook a little. This was new. It must be for the yard waste. Pauly wondered what was happening.
Then the driver moved the truck on down the street, leaving the empty glass bin and the empty yard waste container behind, along with the still-full trash container in between.
"I wish," Pauly complained, "I wish I could see what was happening on the other side of the truck. Does the driver pick up that big bin and dump it?"
"I've seen it," Pippa told him. "That container is too big and heavy when it's full of yard waste. The truck does the work for him. It works the same way with the trash, and we'll see that soon, when the trash truck gets here."
While the dolls were talking, they heard another sound coming from down the street. It was getting closer. "It's another truck!" Pauly exclaimed.
The two dolls watched as a second big truck pulled up in front of Pippa's house. As they watched, a big metal arm came out from the side of the truck. It looked like a big claw. It grabbed the trash bin around the waist. (Does a trash bin have a waist?)
The trash bin moved up the side of the truck until it reached the top.
"It looks like a giant robot arm," Pauly told Pippa, after watching the trash container being turned upside-down, and its contents fall into the truck.
It did, sort of, Pippa thought. "Yes," she agreed, "but the driver operates it from inside the truck, I think." The arm put the trash container back down. "I don't think the truck is a robot. If it were a robot, it wouldn't need a driver, would it?" There was definitely a driver in the truck.
"You're right," said a voice from behind the two dolls.
They turned and saw Mandy standing in the doorway. "The driver does it," she said.
Mandy climbed up onto the daybed and then up to the windowsill, where she joined the two smaller dolls at the window.
The three dolls watched the trash truck as it continued on up the street amidst the swirling snowflakes.
"They take this stuff," Pippa told her friend, "all the stuff that can't be recycled, to something called a landfill. One reason," she added, proud that she knew something and could explain to her friend, "the main reason, actually, we need to recycle is so we don't run out of places to put our trash, but it's also so we don't run out of the stuff we need to make things with."
"I was wondering," Pauly said, "how does the driver make the big arm come out of the truck at just the right place?"
Pippa turned and looked at Mandy.
Then Pauly looked at Mandy. It was obvious that this was something Pippa didn't know, so it must be a Mandy question.
"Well," Mandy said, when it was obvious to her that they wanted her to help them understand, "I have an idea about how that's done, but I don't want to tell you the wrong thing, so let's go look it up." (You don't have to know everything there is to know in the world if you know how to find things out.)
The three dolls jumped down onto the daybed, being careful not to step on the game board, and then climbed over to the wicker trunk, where The Writer's laptop computer was sitting, conveniently open. Mandy pulled the laptop close and typed in a few words. She found a website of a trash company with photos and descriptions of how trash trucks work. "This will be good information," she told them. "Trash and recycling are what they do, so they will know."
She looked around on the website until she found a photo of one of their trash trucks. The photo showed clearly what they had watched from the window. It showed the arms picking up the trash container to dump its contents into the truck. This one worked a little differently from their trash truck, but the idea was the same.
"Let's see if they explain how they operate the arms to pick up the bins," Mandy suggested.
She typed something into the search slot on the website. "It says," Mandy told them when she got what she wanted, although they could read it just as well as she could, "that the driver operates the arm from inside the truck using something called a joystick."
"I know what that is!" Pauly exclaimed excitedly. "Jeffy and his dad use those to play a game together. They each use one! They use them to pretend to fight each other. They move the joystick around to make cartoon people move around on the screen."
Mandy looked at him and nodded. "That sounds like a fun game," she said. Then she scrolled down until she came to another photo. This one showed the inside of the cab of the truck, where the driver sat. "Look at this," she said. The three dolls looked at the photo on the screen.
"Jeffy's joystick looks a lot like this thing in the picture," Pauly told them, pointing to something in the photo of the inside of the truck.
"It must be interesting to live in a family with a real child," Mandy suggested.
Pauly thought it was, but it was also nice to visit a family with other dolls like him and his best friend Pippa. He realized how lucky he was.
Just then, the three dolls heard a truck sound again.
"It's the trash truck!" Pippa exclaimed. "It sounds like it's coming back down the other side of the street."
The three dolls hurried back to the window, careful not to step on the game board, and reached the windowsill just in time to see the trash truck pull up in front of the house across the street.
As they watched, they could just make out the trash container as it was turned upside-down by the trash truck driver using the joystick in the truck. They could see what looked like loose stuff and stuff in plastic bags fall into the truck.
Then Pauly noticed something the other two dolls hadn't. "Hey, look!" he exclaimed. "It's Jeffy! He's coming up to your house!"
The three dolls looked down. It was Jeffy, all right, and he was coming up the walk to the front door.
"He's taking me to a real movie today!" Pauly shouted, jumping up and off the windowsill. "It must be time to go!"
The girls turned to watch Pauly run out the door to the workroom, but he was already gone.
Mandy looked at Pippa, who looked back. "Pauly sure can move fast," Mandy said.
"Yes," Pippa agreed. Then she thought for a moment. "You know," she told her older sister, "I learned something this morning."
Mandy was pretty sure it was going to be about trash trucks, but little Pippa surprised her.
"I learned," Pippa said, "that just because someone hasn't been around as long as I have doesn't mean they don't know things I don't know."
Mandy couldn't argue with that. Pauly had surprised her, too.
Imagine, playing a game with joysticks!
Questions for readers:
1) Name three things you found out from this story that were new to you.
2) Does your family handle trash and recycling the same way as Pippa's family, or do they do some things differently.
3) What do you think is the most important reason to recycle as much as you can? (It can be different from Pippa's reasons, if you like.)
Mandy: Götz Happy Kidz Katie 2015
"The Doll's Storybook" is not affiliated with Gotz Dolls USA Inc. or Götz Puppenmanufaktur International GmbH.
Watch for the next story each Friday afternoon at 1:00 PM Pacific Time.
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