Tuesday, Tuesday, Tuesday, again with the weekly column! Ayyyeeeeeesh! Once again back is the incredible, the rhyme animal, the untypeable E, public enemy number one. This week the Essefficist returns with a question from the inimitable Windy C, political junky, one-time music empress, vicious card shark, and fashionista extraordinaire:

yrs -- windy

Well, Windy, we've found in the past that when a reader asks how an important local entity conducts its activities the best thing to do is to go right to the source. After getting transfered around the Sunset Scav phone system a couple of times, we had the pleasure of speaking to Robert Reed, Director of Corporate Communications for Sunset Scavenger. (It's amazing what wonders the flimsiest of media credentials can do for a feller.) After speaking with Mr. Reed for a bit, the first thing that the Essefficist wants to say is that, not surprisingly, San Francisco has one helluva recycling program and we should all be proud of it. So anyways, Windy, the short answer to your question is "both." People and machines labor hand-in-hand to sort your recyclable junk at a Pier 96 worker's paradise called Recycle Central.

Question for the Essefficist -- now that we've got the big blue bins from Sunset Scavenger, I want to know how do they sort out the recycling? The bins take everything, plastic, paper, cans, bottles -- is there a machine that knows how to sort or do they get humans to do it?