The Ever Growing Trash Bins

I was out for a late season run today, enjoying the warm wind and the late afternoon sunshine, when an odd thought came upon me. I had turned away from the beach and back towards the neighborhoods when I noticed that it must have been trash day in this particular region of Grand Haven because there was the telltale sign of empty, up-turned recycle bins next to brown or blue trash bins. And I thought to myself, "When in the world did trash cans get so enormous?"

It is almost silly to still call them "cans" anymore. It would be more apt to call them mini-dumpsters. It was a change that happened so slowly that I don't think anyone noticed. I know I didn't.

There was a time when people had to carry their trash cans to the curb on trash day. They were round, usually metal, and about four feet high, and as a kid we all imagined that Oscar the Grouch could pop out at any time.

Then some evil genius decided that if he (and I'm sure it was a man) added wheels, slightly to one side, not only would he be able to save the strain on his back, he would be able to move heavier loads.

But that wasn't enough, we switched over to plastic, then thicker plastic, and for awhile that was enough advancement, but then the flip-top canister came along and changed the way the game was played. The Flip-Top (FT among those "in the know") is the Micheal Jordan of trash recepticals. Soon many garbage companies were even providing these to customers because they added the automated dumping mechanism to their truck which was a good thing because it help saved garbagepeople from throwing out thier back by trying to lift one more of your garbage cans full of cinder block chunks.

And if life-in-refuse had stopped there we would all have gone on living happily with our modestly sized, easily wheelable garbage canisters. But then they made the extra-large canisters (the Shaquille O'Neal of trash) which have become so prevalent, so common-place that we have forgotten that there every was anything else. Caryn and I share one of these with our downstairs neighbors and it could easily sleep a family of four comfortably. It has to be somewhere between 80-100 gallons.

If you have ever moved into a larger house you know that you live in the space that you have. We buy things to fill our rooms. It takes reaching the limits of storage space that we begin to clear out some of the clutter. Which begs the question, "What would happen if everyone where forced to use smaller trash cans?" Would we be more aware of everything we throw away? Is it too easy to through something away knowing full well that there is plenty of room for it in the mini-dumpster (MD). No one will see how much or how little anyone else is wasting because who could possibly fill such a large container. And yet people do. Thank the Lord for the hinge-lid smash-down! Without which we might have to reveal to the world that we through away three times our body weight every week.

I'm not suggesting you throw away less, though that would not hurt, all I ask is that the next time your neighborhood has trash day, take a second and think about how blasphemously large everyone's trash cans are, and maybe shed a tear or two.