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Trash TalkOctober 22, 2005 My town has collection of both trash and recyclables; different trucks come round for each. The trash truck has nearly always been and gone by the time I stick my head out the door, but the recyclables are often still waiting at noon, which can get ugly if it's raining and you've got cardboard or newspapers out there. The last time I put my recyclables out, my emptied and upturned bin -- an ordinary medium-size trash barrel with a cover -- had a green sticker on the bottom, notifying me that the town department of public works would no longer collect my recyclables unless I put them out in a regulation town-provided recycling bin. These are about the size and shape of laundry baskets, and they don't have covers, which means you can't store stuff outside in them. Strolling around the neighborhood, as I do once or twice most days, I've noticed that the DPW collects the recyclables of my neighbors who put them out in laundry baskets or plastic milk crates. It seems that the town-provided bin is not actually required as long as the container is small-to-medium in size, open on top, and easily distinguished from a trash barrel. Sometimes I'd go out around midday to find that the recycling truck had been by without collecting my recyclables. Maybe my container looked too much like a trash barrel? I didn't think so: these days you pay $4 per 32-gallon barrel to dispose of your trash, and I, like most of my neighbors, put considerable effort into squishing as much in as the barrel will hold without splitting. My recyclables container was so obviously smaller than 32 gallons that I couldn't imagine a self-respecting Vineyarder paying $4 to get rid of its contents. But I tried to be helpful: I removed the lid, revealing the (duly rinsed) plastic milk jugs and spaghetti sauce jars to anyone who passed down the street. For good measure, I stacked bundled cardboard and/or bundled newspapers on top. For bad weather, I wrote RECYCLABLES in big black letters on the lid. My helpfulness seemed to be working -- my recyclables disappeared along with the rest of the neighborhood's -- so that green sticker took me by surprise. The recyclables are piling up again: I toss them into a grocery bag, then when the bag overflows I dump the contents into the covered container outside. The covered container is nearly full, so it's time to scrounge up a laundry basket (I use canvas bags to schlep my laundry) or, gods forbid, truck down to the DPW and get me a regulation bin. Two or three bins, probably. Meanwhile, as Rhodry and I stroll around the neighborhood, I wonder who cooked up this regulation and why -- cooking up such rules is not the exclusive propensity of my town's DPW, and unfortunately many of the rules are nowhere near as petty. This blog is most likely the first of an occasional several-part series about such petty and not-so-petty rules and why they seem to be proliferating. I've been trying for three days to write it all at once, but I'm swamped with work and when I knock off for the day (usually around 11 p.m.) my brain is too fried to write, so instead I attack Rhodry's coat with a brush and comb -- the deal, totally unfair of course, is that if I can't write, he can't sleep. Anyway, if I "chunk it down," as a friend of mine used to advise, I'll probably figure out what I'm trying to say -- it's just going to take a little longer.
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