Morning Routines. They make the world go ’round. And I cling to my morning routine like a fat kid to the last Peanut M&M in the bag.

Part of my morning routine is shared by the masses in New York; I read the paper on the train (two papers actually). I pick up my AMNY and my New York Post in the station and then read them as thoroughly as I can over the course of my 20 minute commute. I have the two papers in my possession for no more than twenty minutes each day. Then I get off the train at Broadway - Nassau and pile them on top of the hundreds of other newspapers spilling out of the trash cans.

This annoys me for two reasons: One, I don’t like feeling the judging eyes on me as I attempt to put the newspapers into the can only to have them slide off the top of the pile and onto the floor where I leave them for fear of stopping and getting trampled by heard of office-bound cranksters. Two, its just stupid. Why are there no recycling containers on the subway platforms?

I’m not a save-the-world freak, but this seems like such a basic concept: there are thousands upon thousands of people tossing paper of the same weight, color, type into the trash everyday. It seems to me that this would be the perfect recycling material that would require minimal sorting effort. Most of the papers aren’t even wrinkled because people have them for such a short period of time.

The final kick in the teeth from the city is the “Can It For a Greener Planet” stickers that coat the outside of the trash cans. Making the effort to toss your coffee cup in the trash is not going to do a thing to help the planet’s greenness or even the overall appearance of the platforms. But recycling massive amounts of newspapers daily might make a dent…

Virgin Mobile USA will acquire one of the last standing MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) in spending $39 million for Helio. The mobile carrier aimed at the young and hip was co-founded by Earthlink and Korea’s SK Telecom. But like Disney Mobile, ESPN Mobile, and Amp’d MVNOs that crashed and burned, Helio never broke through with consumers. Virgin takes over a mere 170,000 Helio customers. When we first started covering the MVNO space several years ago, pundits said that 500,000 to one million subscribers was a bare minimum for a company to survive the model. Others always speculated that the MVNOs were really start-up ploys designed to attract buy-outs by major carriers in the end. But 170,000 subscribers after several years in business? That amounts to an accounting error at Verizon. Virgin may hope to enter the postpaid wireless game by grabbing Helio. Much of its existing base is younger and using prepaid cards. Helio, which represented higher end handsets and traditional contracted plkans with more advanced data services, may add to Virgin some new models. But it is hard to see how the underperformaning acquisition adds that much to Virgin, which is itself the most successful MVNO in the U.S.