Nice Trash

Recently a large item was delivered to my house. Not only did it arrive in a large box but as it usually happens with large items, the large box was mostly filled with packing Styrofoam. In the good old days I could have just brought this box and it's foamy contents to the street on trash day, but I live in one of those towns which mandates how much stuff you are allowed to throw away in any given week. They give you a couple of trash barrels and if something doesn't fit in a barrel then you are just going to have to find an alternate way to get rid of your trash. So instead of being dragged 20 feet the box had to be specially driven to the dump on Saturday. Also, the people working wouldn't take the Styrofoam with the box - that had to be put in with the rest of the recycling at the normal trash pickup time. Fine, it's annoying to drag this stuff back and forth, but apparently it has to be done.

Unfortunately, these weren't your standard packing peanuts. If that was the case I would have just collected them in a bag and been done with it. Instead this box came full of the harder, sturdier foam panels lining the sides of the box. They weigh about the same, but they are a lot more difficult to squish due to their rigidity, meaning they take up a lot more room. There was no easy way to pack them into the barrel, so what I did instead was put them in a contractors bag, tie it shut to make sure nothing blew away during the night and then placed the bag on top of the open barrel. Not the best-looking solution, but I thought it was good enough to work. Turns out that I was wrong. The next day there was a sticker on the bag, saying that they wouldn't take the recycling away because it was in violation of the rules. Apparently, there aren't supposed to be any plastic bags in recycling barrels and the lids need to be able to close. Essentially, it turns out that my trash wasn't neat enough for the town.

Look, I'm all for recycling but not if you're going to make it into a hassle. It's would be like someone asking you to make some food for a party they were throwing as a favor, but then placing all sorts of dietary restrictions on what you were planning to make. You're lucky I care enough to be recycling at all, but now you'll only take my stuff if it meets all your requirements? Oh, and they didn't even take the rest of my recycling. So, not only did they leave me with an extra bag of stuff to be recycled that wasn't up to some code no one told me existed, they left an entire barrel of stuff that met their requirements and would have been fine to take, meaning my recycling barrel is already full and I have two more weeks to recycling day. When some stuff that should be recycled ends up in the regular garbage due to lack of room they'll have no one to blame but themselves.

When the hell did garbagemen get to become so damn picky? Currently my trash and recycling service is the kind where the trucks roll down the street until it stops in front of a house where a giant arm extends from the side of the truck to pick up the barrel and dump its contents into the bin on the back. And even though the machine seems to be doing all the work, every truck has two guys in it. I get that one guy is there to drive the thing, but as near as I can tell the other guy is just there to make sure the driver doesn't get lonely. You mean to tell me it would have killed him to jump out for 20 seconds to take the bag off the barrel so they could have at least taken the rest of my stuff? He obviously had to get out to put a sticker on it. What, was he unwilling to touch a bag of Styrofoam? He's a professional trash collector: didn't anyone tell him touching other people's garbage might come up at some point? Because I kind of feel like it should have been mentioned during orientation. Or, like me, did he only find out the rules after the fact? I guess it's true what they say: garbage is a dirty business.