Nothing good ever lasts. That stupid old saying is true, isn’t it? Every time you think something’s going to be different, it’s not. Every time you think someone’s going to change, they don’t.

Every time you’re convinced that the evil multinational corporation you’ve been trying to take down is going to do something good for a change, they wriggle out of it.

No rest for the wicked. Not even the toonified wicked.

The Conurban Council formed this special committee that was supposed to be in charge of independently overseeing quality control at the JoyTech recycling center, but as it turns out, there is no quality to control.

What the special committee found inside the center was a big warehouse filled with boxes. Nothing like the pictures supposedly taken by the Daily Ringer when they did a big editorial on the place.

Predictably, JoyTech blamed the whole thing on the same ‘independent contractors’ that were supposedly at fault for the Blood River dumping. Said contractors have managed to disappear, unnamed and without penalty.

Now the recycling center is closed until further notice, and the worst news is that everybody in Ring City is jaded about recycling now, like they think that because of what happened, recycling doesn’t work!

Yes, let’s just let the city turn into a bit toxic waste dump. It will look pretty, in a post-apocalyptic wasteland kind of way.

I went back to the JoyTech recycling center last night, and it was the exact same story as the night before. For some reason, I thought maybe it was a one-time thing. Like they were just getting going and couldn’t handle the volume right off the bat. Which was a stupid way to think. If they were just overloaded, they would dump in a landfill, not Ring City’s largest river.

Anyway, I told Aurora what I saw, and she was actually kind of skeptical, which is BS. Fine. Maybe it was 4 in the morning, but she never doubted me before New Guy came along. In the end, she agreed to send an email to The Daily Ringer asking them to investigate. She said that if there is something going on, they’ll get to the bottom of it.

But I’m doubtful. Jerry says that JoyTech’s got the Ringer wrapped around its finger. He says you can’t trust the news anymore.

Lately, Jerry and Aurora disagree about everything, so in a way, it’s a good thing she never comes over anymore.

Whatevs. We’ll do it her way. And if the Ringer does turn this into a snowjob, we’ll do it my way.

I’m not really sure how to start this post. Maybe just by saying what I saw. But I keep thinking that I must have seen wrong, or misunderstood what I was seeing. It’s just so cliché. So predictable. So exactly what I expected from JoyTech.

Okay, so shut up, Nemo. What’s going on, right?

I finally got up the guts to head over to the JoyTech recycling center last night. And I don’t really know what I was expecting to find. Maybe some evidence that they were throwing out more stuff than they were recycling.

Every recycling program is different, but it happens a lot that they don’t have the time or resources to recycling materials that aren’t properly sorted, so a huge percentage of recycling ends up getting trashed. I wasn’t going to let a big rich company like JoyTech get away with that.

Turns out the situation is about a million times worse.

When I got to the ‘recycling center’ last night, there were a bunch of trucks lined up outside the building – the kind they use at construction sites to haul away rubble. The trucks were going into the center’s loading bay empty, and coming out full. I couldn’t really see what was in the trucks, but it was easy to guess, so I hitched a ride on the back of one, thinking I’d follow them to a landfill, and take some pics of how much recycling JoyTech was getting rid of in secret.

Except we didn’t go to a landfill. We went to the Ridge, a spot where people party over the widest, deepest part of Blood River. Blood River got its name because the mud around here makes the water this dark reddish color. Some people think the color of the river means it’s polluted, but it’s great for swimming and fishing in the summer. Or it used to be.

One by one, the trucks backed up and dumped their loads of ‘recycling over the edge of the Ridge. In the dark, all the tons of junk disappeared into the water.

The trucks all drove away, but I stayed at the lookout a while, watching the water rush past below me. I imagined all the rivers in the world connecting to each other, and all of those rivers flowing out into the ocean, and the ocean, deep and huge and secret, and the world’s biggest garbage dump.

It’s all so horrible. I’ve got to figure out what I can do to fix things.