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Once upon a time life was very different from now in the little town where Arthur lives.
There were no cars and if you had to go shopping or to school, you had to walk or go by bike.

There were no plastic bags, only cloth bags. If you had to buy some pasta at the grocer's, the shopkeeper took it from a big glass container with a big spoon and put it in a paper bag. If you had to go to the butcher's, he cut the meat and put it in wax paper then folded it with yellow paper and everything ended up in your shopping bag.

The milk was brought to your home everyday by the milkman in a glass bottle

with a tin-foil top. The next day he brought the new bottle and took away the old one.

If you fancied a chicken or some eggs you went directly to somebody with a poultry house.

There were no washing machines and everything was hand-washed. Grandma used to tell Arthur that when she was young she went to the creek and she used ashes instead of soap. Later on the houses got running water and soap was created, so now, when Arthur and his wife do the washing, they use a piece of Marseille soap; they have to rub hard, but the clothes end up clean and smelling good.

If you wanted to buy some wine, the wine merchant came and brought you a demijohn or many wine flasks and when they were empty he took them away and brought you filled ones.
"I Gulp Down the Coke" (something like that; I don't remember the exact name) was already on the market but sold only in glass bottles and you had to pay for the bottle, so every time you had to bring back the empty bottles to get your money back.

In the town where Arthur lived there wasn't a lot of garbage. It was, in fact, almost nonexistent because food scraps were given to the dogs or chickens and paper bags were used to start a fire.

There was one thing that Arthur didn't like very much, and that was washing the dishes. Every now and then he and his wife had a little argument about who was supposed to do it but in the end they always reached an agreement.

Shops started to be stocked with all the nice things that already existed in Easeland; everybody could buy disposable plates, glasses, napkins, cutlery and so on.

Time went by and the people were happy with their new life, because now everything was more convenient.

Now in Playland there were new garbage containers; people no longer had to use garbage pails that they then emptied into the garbage truck. There were new garbage bins and a new truck that automatically emptied them.

Unfortunately the amount of garbage was increasing every day and at a certain point there was so much that it couldn't fit into the garbage bins. The person who was supposed to take it away couldn't because the garbage truck was not big enough.

The garbage operator informed all the people and they decided to buy a bigger garbage truck.

With the bigger garbage truck they were able to take away the garbage every day even if, sometimes, the truck had to be pushed because it was too heavy and couldn't start moving by itself.

The people saw that big garbage mountain and asked themselves how such a thing could have happened. Now they were worried because the town was not a nice one any more and was even beginning to stink.

Because of the stinking a lot of people were staying inside their houses as much as possible.

At this point all the inhabitants of Playland held an assembly to try and find a solution to the garbage problem.

A few wanted to go back to the old times when almost nothing was disposable but life was not so easy; others didn't want to give up the ease of modern life: They kept on arguing without end. In the middle of this noisy discussion Arthur fell asleep and had a dream in which people were covered with garbage and their hair was made of plastic dishes which he had just used for eating pasta, while other people were wearing disposable napkins instead of shoes.

When he woke up the assembly was about to end but no agreement had been reached, so Arthur decided to go and visit his uncle in Easeland to see if over there they had the same garbage problems.

Arthur complained to his uncle: "Why didn't you tell us that you have all these problems with garbage and that we too were going to have them?" "I'm sorry, Arthur," answered his uncle, "but when I came to visit you, we didn't yet have all these problems. With the garbage-crushing machine we could compress it and it wasn't a nuisance. But now, with the passing of time, it has grown to a considerable size and we don't know how or what to do, either."

Arthur was angry, thinking that they too had to buy (they too would have to buy) a garbage-crushing machine; it could, however, not solve the problem but only postpone it.

He was so angry that at departure time for Playland he took a wrong plane and landed in another town. When he get off the plane he realized he was in the wrong town because he was not at Playland airport, but it was a wonderful place: everything was tidy, the air had a good smell and there was nothing, really nothing, on the sidewalks or in the streets, not even a cigarette butt or a sweet wrapper.

Arthur slapped his face a couple of times and rubbed his eyes to be sure he was awake and not dreaming; but everything was real: it was an incredibly wonderful place and he decided to go for a walk and try to find something more out about this amazing town.

After a while he stopped because his curiosity was aroused by the number of garbage containers; yes, because over there, there wasn't only one big container as in Playland, but there were actually five.

Arthur was thinking: "What do they do with all those containers?" But in the meanwhile a man was passing nearby and Arthur couldn't help asking:

"Excuse me, sir, but what do you need all those containers for?"

"What do you mean?" answered the man. "They are for the garbage.".

"But why five ?" continued Arthur. "Isn't one enough?"

" Ah, I see, you must be a tourist. This is Recycleland; we recycle everything and throw away almost nothing. In the first container we put paper; in the second organic waste; in the third, the one a bit taller, cloth and used clothes; in the fourth, the bell-shaped one, glass, plastic and cans, and in the last one we put the remaining garbage that, as a matter or fact, is not very much."
Arthur was listening open mouthed and couldn't help asking: "You don't have a big garbage dump, do you?"
"-No, of course not," was the answer. "I told you that we recycle almost everything."

Arthur would have liked to stay in Recycleland because he had been dreaming about a city like that for a long time but he decided that the best thing to do was to go back to Playland, talk to all the people and convince them to transform Playland into a new Recycleland in order to have a beautiful and clean town.

Arthur then informed his uncle in order to offer them the opportunity to change their way of life in Easeland but he was later informed by his uncle that over there people thought recycling was too much trouble and they were happy with the garbage-crushing machine. Somebody proposed a more powerful machine and somebody else said they could build a new machine to burn all the garbage.

In Playland, on the contrary, everybody changed their ways and (they) began to recycle everything.

The town changed completely end everybody was happy. Playland again became beautiful and clean as in the past (in the old days) and the people, after a while, returned to some of their old habits and began to avoid the use of plastic dishes and other disposable things.

And Arthur and his wife stopped quarrelling about washing the dished, because they bought a dishwasher.

In the meantime (Meanwhile) Arthur's wife was expecting a baby girl and they didn't know what name to give her: he liked Linda, she preferred Serena. But don't worry, after arguing a little they surely, as usual, ended up agreeing.