Trash

From outside come the steady beeps of the garbage truck as it backs into the cul-de-sac. But we don’t call it a garbage truck these days. The environmentally correct term is ‘waste management conveyance’.

On alternate Thursdays three trucks arrive, at different times, to pick up respectively 1) household trash including garbage; 2) the recyclable items, paper, cardboard cartons, plastics, glass, and metal; and 3) garden cuttings and yard waste.

It used to be that the plastics and glass had to be placed in one bin, old newspapers in another, and paper items and cardboard in yet another. Things are simpler now – mixing disparate recyclables in the same bin is permitted. Presumably sorting will take place later at the recycling plant.

The trucks are large. These days each household trash truck is operated by one man. He drives and does the picking up all by himself. In the past there used to be three men, one to drive, and the other two to run around pushing large steel bins on casters, into which the contents of householders’ trash cans are deposited, usually with a considerable amount of noise, all up and down the street.

One never sees women doing this kind of work. I am guessing that the physical strength required to lift heavy trash bins may be the reason.

I would often be awakened by the noise of trash collecting. Some Thursday mornings I would wake with a start upon realizing that I had forgotten to put out the trash container the night before. But that sort of oversight happened only infrequently, I’m happy to say.

I have settled into a ritual on Wednesday evenings. I go around the house collecting all the rubbish I can find: old magazines and newspapers, wastebasket contents, empty or near-empty plastic water bottles, plastic bags filled with shredded paper from the paper shredder. Using a hand-truck that I had acquired specifically for the purpose, I wheel the cumbersome bins of recyclable items up the driveway and over to curbside for the next morning’s pick-up.

The job is harder if we had a house party the previous weekend, as we just did.