This morning I went out to deposit last-minute bags into the trash bin before the weekly pick up. When I opened the black trash bin cover, I discovered the can was almost empty. Just a few bags of dog stuff were inside. The one white plastic bag full of un-recyclable crud that was in the bin last night when I rolled it to the curb was gone.
We recycle everything, so only mangled, plastic wrappy waste goes into the trash bag that goes into the black void. I doubt that there was even a slip of paper with our names on it, since paper and bulk mail is eminently recyclable in the blue can.
I often wheel the blue bin to the street Monday mornings so that the trash pickers don’t go through credit card offers and discarded papers that have our names and address on them. But, I am at a loss about why anyone would want the black-bin trash.
My best guess is that a neighbor put something odd in their trash and used our plastic bag to cover it. I haven’t search near-by cans to test my theory, though.
I’ll just settle for accepting that sometimes living in the city is just so weird!
It is well worth the investment (and no longer only the realm of the paranoid) to purchase a powerful paper shredder and shred all documents with personal information.
Yes, but I am not sure if I need to shred the yuky plastic wrap that the Costco chicken sausages came in! That’s the kind of stuff we put in the black trash.
You mentioned credit card receipts and the like. 🙂
I wash the yucky Costco plastic wrap in hot water and Dawn to get the greasy smelly stuff off, then rinse it and toss it into the recycling bin.
Yes, we shred too. On the washing of plastic – you have to work out the cost of the gas/electric to heat the water, and the cost in chemicals and containers and transportation to get the Dawn to you, plus the water treatment to clean the Dawn out of the waste water, to determine if this is ecologically friendly… My head hurts when I try to work out if recycling is always worth it!
Last year, City of Sunnyvale altered their garbage collection rate schedule.
They reduced both the monthly charge for one garbage container AND the size of the garbage container. The new garbage containers are roughly 60% the size of the old containers.
At the same time, they increased the cost of keeping one of the old (larger) containers.
However, they left residents with the older, larger recycling containers.
This provided us with an economic incentive to reduce our garbage stream and increase our recycling stream.
So I wash the stinky plastics and glass using hot water and Dawn not because I measured it as the ecologically friendliest option, but simply because it lets us recycle the maximum amount of plastic and glass without stinking up the kitchen and/or attracting insects.