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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/neuralsnafu on 2025-04-26 15:01:13+00:00.
This story happens over a decade ago, when my city was starting up a 'must use this bin for trash, and a recycle bin will be provided as well' schemes.
My roommates and I got the notice for this new change over and we were reading the requirements and such, we all noticed one glaring thing. All paper products must be loose, and not bagged. This included shreds... My friends and I discuss this and talk about how dumb it is etc... and then the new phonebooks started showing up. Queue bright idea...
We then started asking at work, friends, family, neighbors etc if they had anything they needed to shred and if we could have their phone books (I mean, even at that point, no one used em anyways). We had literal piles of phone books and papers, envelopes, and anything else paper we could run through our shredders.
I think it took a few weeks for us to manage to get through all the phone books we had, and iirc we killed at least one shredder...
In the end we had like 4 30 gallon trash bags full of shreds, cross cut confetti sized shreds. Which we then lovingly packed into the recycle bin, full to the top, and slightly packed. Then trash day comes...
Unfortunately I worked nights so I didn't get to see the dumping of the shreds, but upon waking I knew it was a glorious occasion... shreds everywhere...
I would imagine that we were not the only ones with this bright idea as a few weeks later a notice showed up, stating that the rules had been amended, all shreds were to be bagged in clear plastic trash bags...