I appreciate the good garbage service

[elizilla]

Remember last summer when we paid Juan and Roy to take away a small dump truck load of bricks and concrete that we dug up out of the backyard? Well, we are continuing to excavate that stuff, not in such quantities as last year, but a few pieces at a time. We've been putting them in the trash and the garbage men are actually taking them! I just watched them take another batch.

We have also put out tires and they've taken them. They took a dead toilet. Haven't put out any furniture yet, or put out a dozen garbage cans worth at once, but I've seen the neighbors get away with it. I'm not a trash pickup abuser; I rarely have to set out more than one can, but everywhere else I have lived, the trash men have been persnickety about tires or mattresses or construction debris or large quantities. Once in a while I'd have to take a special trip to the dump to get rid of a few difficult objects, and a couple times I even did a dump trip to get rid of a pile that the neighbors had put out and I was sick of looking at.

We also have curbside recycling. And the curbside compostable pickup is stellar - not only do they take cans of leaves on garbage day, they pick up brush within a day or two, whenever you set it out, instead of it sitting on the curb for weeks before the chipper truck comes. And there's a vacuum truck that picks up leaves in the fall. You can just rake them to the curb.

I have never in my adult life lived somewhere with such generous curbside pickup. Yes, we pay for this; it's a line item on the water bill. But what we get for that price is terrific.

Comments

[also-huey.livejournal.com]

The service here is not nearly so good, but the rule seems to be "we'll take anything that fits in the 80-gallon wheelie bin".

So the big twenty-year-old threadbare fold-out couch that smelled like dog got reduced to pieces small enough to fit in the wheelie bin. Some of that required a sawzall with a metal-cutting blade. Busted toilet? Sledgehammer. And so on.

[(Anonymous)]

I am jealous. We have curbside recycling *in theory* up in East Cupcake, but the "sanitation engineers" would give Jonathon Winters' trashbag-touting character from the Hefty commercials a run for the money.

-R

[the-rigger.livejournal.com]

I am extremely jealous. We have curbside recycling *in theory*, but the mooks here in Cupcake make the Jonathon Winters character from the Hefty trash bag commercials look like slobs; they're *far* too Prima Donna to actually touch trash.