The Junk Pile

This is a meta puzzle involving answers from the 14 basement puzzles.

We are presented with an image which most notably has a recycle logo and 14 cardboard boxes on it. The flavor text mentions the slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.” We realize these are three steps to transform the 14 puzzle answers. Furthermore, a lot of these answers share letters. PETER OUT, PET PEEVE, and PETTINESS in particular all start with PET, which we remember is a common abbreviation for a certain type of plastic. We can find these plastic codes in each of the answers.

We “reduce” each of the answers by removing the plastic found in it. In some cases, there are multiple plastics found in an answer – these ambiguities can be resolved in later steps. We “reuse” a letter in each answer by duplicating it somewhere in the new string. Finally, we “recycle” the answer by rotating the string until we get a word.

Each of the cardboard boxes also has some hover text associated with it. The descriptions are incredibly vague, but we can map each of the final recycled words to a description. The description is often good confirmation that a recycled word is correct. The cardboard boxes can be read left to right to provide an ordering. Finally, the question mark inside the recycle logo tells us that we need the recycling number, commonly found inside the triangle. We use the recycling number that corresponds to the reduced plastic to index into the recycled word, which gives us DUMPSTER DRIVES.