Garbage

Reasons You’ll Love Living in the Suburbs: Your Life Becomes Much Less Garbage-Intensive

October 5, 2012 by Joseph Rand

I miss a lot of things about living in the city. The energy of the streets. The restaurants. The take out food.

But you know what I don’t miss? The garbage.

Garbage in the city is a nightmare. First, there’s the smell. Oh, Sweet Jesus, that smell. I forgot all about that smell until I spent a night in the city a few weeks ago. Woke up bright and early to get some coffee, walked out of the midtown hotel, and it hit me. The smell of 1.6 million people crammed into about three square miles, of dumpsters in alleys, of overflowing garbage cans on ever corner, of storekeepers with dirty mops splashing water around on the pavement, doing nothing more than just re-animating the stink. It’s everywhere, and when you live in the city, you just kind of get used to it, the way you get used to the noise and the crowds and everything else that comes from urban living. But, boy, if you’ve been away for a while, it’s like a slap in the face. A big smelly slap.

And it’s not just the garbage on the streets. Dealing with garbage in your home is one of the worst parts of living in the city. As usual, it’s all about the small spaces. When you live in 700, or 1,000, or even 2,000 square feet, every inch of your home is precious. So it’s just simply appalling how much of that space gets given over to garbage.

To start with, you got your garbage can, sitting in the corner of your kitchen and blocking your access to your cabinets. And if that’s not bad enough, you’ve got ANOTHER can for your recycleables, because God Forbid you mix bottles in with your more pedestrian garbage and kill all the dolphins, or whatever. On top of that, you’ve got your pile of newspapers piling up in a corner. All of that stuff, taking up your precious real estate.

But that’s not all, because at some point you end up with more garbage than can fit in the cans. Alas, it’s not yet garbage pickup day, and you’re not allowed to just put your garbage out on the street any old time you want because that would be URBAN CHAOS, so you have to pull out the bag and store it on the floor for a few days, where various moist discarded products seep through that thin layer of polypropylene to add a little urban ambiance to your apartment.

So now you’ve got your garbage can, recycling can, a pile of newspapers, and a seeping bag of filthy garbage cluttering up your small apartment. Think of how expensive that is. Manhattan real estate is about $1,200 per square foot. A standard garbage can is maybe 2’x2’, which is four square feet (disclaimer – not good at math). So one garbage can is worth about $4,800 in space. Add another one for recycleables, and then a few feet for the pile of newspapers, and another spot for that decomposing bag of refuse in the corner, and you’re talking about over ten grand just to keep the garbage in your home.

But it doesn’t end there. Bad enough you have all this garbage in your home, you now have to get it down to the street. Now, maybe that’s not so bad if you live in an elevator building, or if you’re blessed with one of those garbage chutes. I was lucky enough to live for two years in a garbage chute building, and I miss it to this day. Walk down the hall, open the hatch, fling the garbage down, and listen for the clunkety-clunk-clunk as it careens down 15 flights. Just awesome. I loved throwing stuff down that chute. I looked for things to throw out just to hear what it would sound like when they hit bottom.

But for most of my years in the city, I lived in a walk-up. Which is also a walk-down. Which means walking down laden with garbage – the seeping bags, clanking bottles, the bundles of newspapers that I had to tie up with twine in one of the worst chores of my week.

Here’s how it typically went:

Come home after a long day.
Realize that the apartment was filled with garbage and that the pickup is the next morning.
Explain to wife that I’m too tired to carry it down, promising to do it first thing in the morning.
Wake up to the sound of the garbage truck pulling away from my building.
Run down in my boxers and sandals carrying fistfuls of garbage.
Chase truck down the street.
Throw garbage directly into truck.
Endure disapproving stares from sanitation workers.
Walk back to apartment.
Endure disapproving stares of neighbors.
Get back to apartment.
Realize I forgot my keys.
Buzz up to my wife to let me in.
More disapproving stares.

This happened a lot.

In fact, I remember one time that I promised to bring the garbage down in the morning, woke up too late, and rather than admit to the wife that I had failed in what is a fundamental husbandly duty, I pretended to take the garbage down when I left for the morning. But since the truck had already come, I instead carried the garbage to the corner and stealthily dumped it into a public trash can, looking nervously around for the garbage cops to come take me away. Walking away from that trash can, having gotten away with dumping my personal trash in the public can, I felt like I was one of Ocean’s Eleven. OUTLAW!

I rode that high all day. Then I come home, and my wife immediately confronts me with, “Did you throw our garbage in the can on the corner?” To this day, I don’t know how she caught me. Women are sneaky.

So that’s another reason you’ll love living in the suburbs – your life becomes much less garbage intensive. No more garbage cans cluttering up your limited space, because the spacious kitchens all have built in refuse cabinets. No more garbage bags in your hallway, because everyone has garages with trash cans all your own where you can dump the bags, then joyfully roll them out to the street for pickup.

And, of course, no more garbage stink on the streets, the smell of teeming, anxious masses who partied too late and too hard. No, instead you smell…nothing. Nothing bad, nothing particularly good, just the faint scent of, well, blandness — the distinctive fragrance of the suburbs. But in this case, bland is a LOT better than the alternative……

The Joys of Elevators, Garbage Edition

September 19, 2009 by Joseph Rand

I wrote recently about the joys of elevators, particularly coupled with the nifty-if-battered-and-stolen shopping cart that I use to take groceries or other bags from my car to my condo unit.

But the joy doesn’t stop there. The elevator not only goes up, it goes down. Which means I can use it to take out the garbage.

I hate garbage. I particularly hate modern garbage. Old timey traditional garbage was nice and simple. You take anything you want to throw out, you put it in a bag, and three or four times a week you take the garbage to the curb and nice men take it away for you.

Modern garbage is different. Now, you have to separate out certain types of garbage from other types of garbage, with the delineation between garbage types often seemingly arbitrary. Some paper goes into the clear garbage bags, other paper into the black garbage bags. And if you get it wrong, the mean people from some sort of enforcement division give you a ticket.

Not only that, but in my old apartment on the UWS, garbage was even worse.
First of all, my apartment was a walkup, three flights to the street. So I’d come home at night, climb those stairs, and have to pick up garbage to walk down the stairs, only to have to walk back up if I wanted to sleep in my apartment. I hated climbing those stairs.

Second, they only picked up the clear garbage once a week, so you had to live with the clutter and stink of old cans and bottles for days and days until you could get rid of it. And if you forgot to drop them off Tuesday night, as I often did, you lived with them another week.

(Which reminds me of the time that I forgot, despite much nagging reminding from the wife, to bring the regular garbage down. And this wasn’t regular garbage, but three or four days worth of stinky garbage. So I oversleep a little the next morning, realize I forgot to put out the garbage, look out the window, and realize that the nice men have already come, and I’ve got two more days of stinky garbage and unhappy wife in front of me. Without telling her, I took the garbage down to the street, and nonchalantly (as nonchalantly as you can be carrying two bags of stinky garbage) carried it to the street, where I blatantly and illegally dumped them in the garbage can on the corner. I then slinked (slunk?) away, hoping no one saw me, and then cheerily went to work with the airy feeling of a man who has gotten away with something. That night, my wife sees me, and says, “was that OUR garbage in the can on the corner?” I still don’t know how she caught me).

And third, I hated the tying. I don’t know why this in particular bothered me, but I hated collecting all the newspapers — and I read a lot of newspapers — and tying them with twine. I hated doing that.

So one of the GREAT things about living in the suburbs is the joy of putting out the garbage. I still have the clear and the opaque, but here are the differences:

1. The elevator
Instead of walking up and down stairs, I take the garbage down in the elevator. I may not have mentioned this, but I hate stairs.

2. The shopping cart
My stolen shopping cart — stolen not by me, mind you — means I don’t even have to carry the garbage. I load it in the cart, and just roll it. Whoever invented wheels, I salute you.

3. The garbage room
I’ve never had a garbage room before. It’s a room, a very very very stinky room, in which we put the garbage. And we can put it there anytime we want, any day of the week. No more forgetting when the pickups are.

4. No twine
This is the best. No more twine. The nice guys who pick up the recycleables just want you to dump the newspapers into one of the bins — no bags, no twine. By itself, this change in my life has improved my daily mood by 8.5%.

So although I miss certain things about living in the city, my suburban garbage experience kicks ass.