Trash Days -- I'd like a change
More trash talking!
If you live in Flower Mound, you know pretty well how the trash system works. The town is divided up into five sections, and each section is assigned a specific day for their weekly pickup. I live south, and our pickup day is Friday. Let me tell you why Friday sucks, and why I want to change.
- First, if you do any weekend gardening or home improvement, you're left with the leftovers of your work all week long. There's nothing like 5 days of decomposing yard waste rotting in your trash bin.
- Second, whenever there's a holiday, everyone in town gets pushed back a week. No big deal, unless you're a Friday customer who's pushed back to Saturday, and then they miss your pickup, as sometimes is the case. Then you're stuck with all your trash until Monday, because you can't get anyone at Trinity to answer the phone.
I know this will go nowhere, but here's what I think is fair. Why don't we rotate trash days every year, or every 2 years? Those of us on Fridays would love to switch to Mondays, or at least earlier in the week. Seems only fair to me. How about you?
posted by Chip Mahaney @ 10:06 PM
3 comments
3 Comments:
We're on Fridays, too. But I don't think I can handle it being changed every couple of years. It's taken me 5 years to memorize when bulk pickup happens...
Okay... I get confused when people refer to the *next* period of time as pushed *up* or pushed *back*. We have Friday trash day and if it's a holiday week, then our trash is pushed up to Saturday pick up. We've never been forgotten. I think BULK pick-up co-ordinates with the EVEN or ODD side of the street (even numbers = even weeks) but I'm not sure.
In my fair town (Lexington, MA), the town leaders a few years back decided to encourage recycling by going from pick-up every two weeks to every week (recycling is done separately from trash pick-up, which has always been every week). Sounds good, right? Well, they also decided to further "encourage" recycling by implementing a "pay-as-you-throw" program which forced all residents to buy tags to put on each trash bag we threw out, or buy stickers to put on each trash can that went to the curb (stickers had to be renewed every 6 months). Apparently the town government at the time favored the stick over the carrot when it came to motivating behavior. Anyhow, the implementation of this policy caused a huge uproar from the citizenry who felt they weren't appropriately consulted about these new fees. It also caused a huge lawsuit since the town by-laws explicitly state that the town must provide for free trash disposal. (The town argued that "free" really means "available to anyone" ... yeah, right!) Fortunately, the lawsuit was successful and now we're back to the status quo of happily throwing out as much trash as we feel like without paying per unit volume. And many of the town leaders who had championed the plan got kicked out at the next elections, and the guy who organized the lawsuit got voted in, so there's a cautionary tale in there somewhere.
What does this have to do with Flower Mound? Nothing, really, but I just wanted to share what's been happening on the garbage scene in New England (I'm Chip's sister who's been living up here since college).
BTW, I don't know exactly what a 95-gallon polycart is but I'm jealous of you all for having them. We have one tiny yellow town-provided recyling bin which accommodates about 1/4 of our weekly recycling, so we put the rest in old laundry baskets and mail bins from the USPS (the ones that they use to deliver your mail after you get back from two weeks of vacation -- I guess you're supposed to give them back but oh well). We also have five plastic trash cans, most of which have holes and cracks. We would throw them out and replace them with new ones, but have you ever tried to throw out a trash can? They just get left on the curb. So I love the whole concept of 95-gallon poly-bins, and I'm betting that in a spiffy town like Flower Mound they all match and make the town look really coordinated. Perhaps I'll run for town office, and that can be my platform: "Lexington 2007: Matching 95-Gallon Poly-Bins for All!"
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