Good Morning.
I've written about the earthshaking subject of garbage before, but it was in regard to watching the trucks collect the neighborhood trash in a variety of colored bins. Today I'll discuss the process American consumers must use every week unless they suffer from hoarding.
Years ago people threw everything in the same receptacle. Actually the remains of food like orange peels and chicken bones went into a container in the ground that was removed, taken to the truck, and returned. Then garbage disposers were invented and many foods could be ground up through the kitchen sink although everyone has called the plumber because they thought they get could get rid of potato skins and found out otherwise. In any case, everything other than food waste went into a silvery gray tin can, including plastic items, empty soup cans, boxes of every sort, discarded mail, vacuum cleaner refuse - literally anything no longer wanted in the house. Milk was delivered in glass bottles, rinsed after use, and returned to the box for the milk man, and of course, nobody worried about some creep rifling through the trash to find information they could use in identity theft.
Then recycling came along but things had to be sorted - plastic from glass and glass from tin, magazines from newspapers, and brown cartons that had to be collapsed. It was just plain tedious and nobody liked it. Then they made it easier and said that plastic, glass, and tin could all go together and somebody would sort it somewhere else. The boxes still had to be flattened, but magazines and newspapers could be combined. Yard waste was a different matter. It had to go into brown paper biodegradable bags rather than those big black plastic things designed to last forever. The problem with environmentally friendly bags was they fell apart if it rained, so you had a choice: you could pack up your grass and leaves, haul the bags into the garage for safekeeping, and put it out for collection at the last minute, or you could put it out ahead of time and hope it didn't rain and dump the junk out the bottom when lifted by a garbage man.
My regular trash goes into a blue plastic trash bin every week, but I can set it out on Tuesday morning because the truck doesn't come until close to noon. The recycles go into a larger blue bin and are taken every other week but have to be put out the night before because the stuff is picked up by a different truck at a time when I'm still sitting around in my jammies.
My driveway has a definite slope so I push these cans, fortunately on wheels, to the start of the dip because I'd most certainly roll down the driveway with my cans if I ventured further and land in a heap on the sidewalk. So far no complaints from the company that has a Bible verse on their statements that come every three months. I switched to this outfit four or five years ago when my daughter alerted me to the fact that it was half the cost of the other companies and I'd get exactly the same service and she'd get a free month if I made the change. She was correct. I get the same service from the people with blue cans as I did from the people with red but please don't draw any political conclusions. We're just talking trash here.
Best regards,
Elisabeth
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