Everything is in one cage now.
A steel mesh trolley, taller than a man, on four black castors, with a rusted frame and a diagonal brace across the upper half. It is packed to the wire with clear bottles lying at every angle a bottle can lie at. Necks through squares of mesh. Bases pressed flat against the inside. A single fluorescent tube on the ceiling above it, and beyond the reach of that tube the room goes to green plaster and then to nothing.
No bag exists any more. No crate, no household, no street, no morning. There is a quantity of clear glass in a cage, and the only remaining question anyone in the building can ask about it is how much.
That is the point of the cage and it works. Sorting is the entire trade here. Clear from green, glass from plastic, deposit from non-deposit, and the sorting has to end in a container that holds one kind of thing so completely that nobody has to look inside it again. This cage is the answer to a question that was asked at the counting window an hour ago, and the answer is a number, and the number is right.
It is also on wheels, and I want that noticed. Somebody worked out that a full cage of glass weighs more than any back should be asked to move, and put castors under it, and that decision has saved more spines than most acts of charity I could name. There is nothing wrong with this object.
Now look at the floor.
Around the wheels, trodden into the grime and the worn stone, there are scraps of pale paper. Small ones. Torn at the ends. I counted the ones I could see from where I stood and there were more of them than there were people in the building that morning. They are the receipts. They come out at the window, they go into a hand, the hand walks about ten steps, and then they are down here getting walked on by everybody who passes with a trolley.
So the sorting has actually produced two piles, and only one of them went into the cage. The value is inside the wire, held together, counted, correct, ready to go out on a truck. The account of who brought it is on the ground in pieces, face down, greyed over by boot prints, distributed across the floor at random.
Nobody threw them away in anger. A receipt is a thing you hold while you are still deciding whether you need it, and then your hands are full, and the pocket is the wrong pocket, and it goes.
I painted the cage lit and the paper barely lit, which is what the tube was doing, and which is also the arrangement exactly.