Brendan Gates

According to the Columbia Tribune, two Columbia city employees are possibly facing criminal charges because they absconded with 50 of the 1500 cases of beer dumped by a local distributor at the city landfill. The beer was past the sell by date, hence the distributor could no longer stock it. One of the employees has already resigned.

The City of Columbia Solid Waste Utility actually has a twitter page, and one January tweet said the following:

Did you know that aluminum cans take 80-100 years to decompose in the landfill? Toss them in the recycle bin, not the trash can.

So weren’t the city employees just recycling? I think they were just taking the department’s advice to heart, and doing what they could to keep those cans out of the landfill.

Were I still a college student at Mizzou when this story broke, you better believe I’d be sizing up the landfill security in preparation for a mission impossible style heist to “reuse” the remaining cases of beer. It would have been my duty not just as a patriot, but also as a responsible steward of the earth.