It’s All Rubbish!
We live inside the city limits, so our garbage service is provided by the city. In many ways, this is a very good thing! When we rake our leaves in the fall, we can put them along the curb, and street sweepers will come along and remove them. When branches and twigs accumulate in the yard, we stack them in the alley, and they are removed. We have even had large objects like a broken double oven and a bookshelf removed from our alley, but they were taken by people in old pick-up trucks.
One problem with city garbage service is that there is no competition. The same problem you run into at the DMV. No competition means that they can make the rules and it really doesn’t matter what everone thinks.
Today I happened to be in my kitchen when the trash truck rolled down the alley. I watched in surprise as the truck lifted my yard waste can and dumped the contents into the truck, and then lifted my garbage can and did the same. My understanding was that we had two cans because the things in the cans were picked up by two different trucks. Lawn clippings, leaves, and twigs do not need to be in a landfill along with dirty diapers and pizza boxes. They can be composted, and that was what I had been lead to believe our city was doing. Apparently not.
Which reminds me of a story from when we lived in Atlanta. We used Peach State garbage ( a[private company), and we paid them an extra $1 per month for the privilege of having a little recycle container. I was in my front den one morning when the garbage truck came by. A man hopped out, dumped my recycle bin into my garbage can, and then hoisted the can onto the truck and dumped it. I thought it had to be a one-time thing, but just in case, I was ready with my camera the next week. The same thing happened, and I took pictures. Our whole, very large neighborhood had a contract with Peach State, and finally enough people complained that they stopped charging us money to dump our recycling in with our garbage. I suspect that although they began sending a separate truck, they still combined the things–they just did it out of our sight instead of right in front of our house.
Which makes me wonder–if I am able to complain and make a ruckus about my current garbage issue, will anything be done in this monopoly? And if it is, will it be a real change? Or will they just combine my yard waste with my garbage once they are out of my sight? I think I need to get one of these and just composte my yard waste myself!
September 27th, 2006 at 10:29 am
I totally am with you on this. It seems many gov. programs are run like this…inefficiently! I just had a similar experience with the mail. We recently (1.5 months) ago moved. We stayed in the same city just a different house. I forwarded our mail, sending in the form about 4 weeks before we moved and included our move date as the date to begin forwarding the mail.
My dh took his bar this summer and about 2.5 weeks after we moved they sent out the results. We waited and waited and waited. He finally called the bar and asked them to send out another copy of the results as he had not gotten them. Everyone else in his firm who took it knew the first week of Sept. It finally dawned on me to call our old townhouse complex and ask them to check the mail box. It was FULL of mail. Don’t get me wrong, we did get some stuff forwarded, leading us to believe the post office was doing it’s job, but it wasn’t. I don’t even know how all that mail fit in our little box.
Thankfully he did pass his bar and through it we now know not to trust the mail system. I find it funny that we always got our bills, including credit card bills, but not other important items.
Christina
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