I hate to admit it, but today’s column is absolute garbage. It’s one of those things everyone in the entire country must deal with, but the more you get into it, the nastier it smells. It’s now to the point that when I wake up on a Wednesday morning, the first thing I think is, “I have to put the garbage out!”
Depending on the week, that means I either have to spend half the day sorting out what goes into what can and what’s going to get left at the curb because the haulers won’t take it away.
Before I continue, I just want to make it clear that I’m not, in any way, trashing my garbage collectors. They do a great job, But like so many things on this side of the pond, the whole process is so complicated I could easily fill one of my trash cans with red tape if I only knew which one to put it in!
Growing up in England, everybody had a metal can with a lid. The buckled lids may have never fit properly, but since you could fill it up with any amount of whatever you wanted, it really didn’t matter if the lid sat like a beret on the side of its head.
As times changed, the bins turned into the larger plastic ones on wheels. Where it all went wrong was when we decided to save the planet by recycling.
Now don’t get me wrong, if simply separating out recycling from worthless trash was easy, I’d be all for it. But if all the lists of how and what to recycle were printed out on pieces of paper, there wouldn’t be any trees left.
When we moved to our new house in February, we had to order new trash cans. The first problem was deciding what size we needed. The website conveniently listed all our choices. But did we want 35 gallons, 65 gallons or 95 gallons?
If they’d have pictured something useful next to each picture, like the Statue of Liberty, it would have saved us the embarrassment of having the largest trash cans on the block. They obviously want you to recycle as it was better value to get a recycling cart the same size as the trash can and not the Barbie-sized one we used to have.
Turns out moving house generates a lot of extra trash. Although our movers offered to collect the hundreds of boxes and mountains of packing paper when we were done, I don’t think they were planning on coming back multiple times. Since we still haven’t fully unpacked because of all the remodeling, it made more sense to do it on a weekly basis.
A trash can the size of Mount Rushmore wouldn’t be enough to collect up all our waste in the weeks since we’ve lived in our new home, and that’s just the recycling. Every week I’ve carefully pushed out two full carts. One is usually crammed with flattened boxes, assorted cardboard and plastic wrapping. The other everything else. But that’s not the half of it.
All these new rules and regulations have made me totally obsessive about what and how to throw things out. I can recycle glass jars, but not broken glass. City of Naperville residents can dispose of two bulky items a week, but oversize items require an additional charge. “Am I oversize or merely bulky” is a question I now ask myself daily.
Although I could be on the U.S. Olympic team for flattening boxes, sadly not everything we moved was packaged that way. We had several specially constructed wooden crates for things like glass tabletops and a chandelier. If there’s one thing my husband, aka Grumpy, likes even more than pretending he can build something, it’s dissecting.
“I’ll just pull these apart and we can put the wood in the recycling can,” he said, brandishing a claw hammer.
“I don’t think it’s quite that simple,” I said. “For a start, I don’t think you can recycle wood unless it’s a Christmas tree. Plus, the can is already full of cardboard and 23 carefully washed bottle tops.”
A call to the waste company (I have them both on an app and speed dial) revealed they would collect the wood but only if put in bundles under four feet in length. Sadly, even when we’d clawed and sawed to make that happen, it was still left behind because we’d put it on the trash side of the driveway instead of the recycling side.
All this has made Grumpy even more obsessive than I am about how much garbage is allowed. He has to make sure the lid is firmly closed, even though several of our neighbors pile theirs up so high the lid flaps around like a veil in a hurricane.
Black trash bags that don’t make it into the can have to be stickered and weigh less than 50 pounds. Have you ever tried weighing a dirty, overstuffed trash bag on your bathroom scales? No, me neither.
Each week I peep out in terror from my bedroom window to see if everything we’ve left has been collected or not.
The only kind thing I have to say is about the pickers, those lovely men who drive rickety trucks around the neighborhood looking for treasures in the trash heaps. Things I feared would be left behind by the garbage haulers — an old oven, a microwave, three massive electric fans that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the nose of a Spitfire — found a home in the back of their trucks.
That’s recycling at its best.
Hilary Decent is a freelance journalist who moved from England to Naperville in 2007.
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