I don't know about you, but I find the Container Store catalog practically pornographic. I can spend hours pawing through it, imagining a life in which everything not just has its place, but a color-coordinated, perfectly sized and thoughtfully configured one.
But as with all porn, the thrill is illusory. Eventually, I return to the real world, where my clutter remains scattered on countertops or forever underfoot, free radicals that defy containment by mere polypropylene stacking bins or galvanized storage cubes.
Still, the lure of the perfect receptacle endures.
So now I turn my desirous eyes toward those green, lidded, wheeled, rat-proof and bar-coded trash cans that Baltimore City wants to issue to each and every household in its latest effort to manage our messes and contain our overconsumption.
At a Tuesday hearing on another tidy-up initiative - City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake's proposed toughening of the illegal-dumping ordinance - officials unveiled a plan to hand out 64-gallon trash cans with attached lids to every household, which garbage trucks can lift and empty automatically. It's a way to get residents to stop putting their garbage out in plastic bags, which are (a) too easily gnawed through by rats and (b) against the law. (You're already supposed to be using a lidded container, although the city acknowledges that about half the households don't.)
But the new trash cans - which the city hopes to send forth this summer - are also something of a bait and switch. Baltimore wants to go to from twice- to once-weekly trash pick-up, a prospect that drives everyone crazy whenever it's broached, and the city no doubt hopes for whatever shiny-new-thing distraction the new cans provide. It may be on to something - remember the crowds that lined up in the cold a year ago for the coveted yellow recycling bins? Maybe the city could similarly order too few of the trash cans and create a similar mad rush for them.
Actually, it won't work in quite so chaotic a way. The city plans to buy one for just about every household, and each will be bar-coded with the home's address. (So, no, you don't have to paint "STOLEN FROM" and your address on your trash cans anymore.) Celeste Amato, director of Mayor Sheila Dixon's cleaner-greener program, said the city is working out the details - in some older neighborhoods, for example, some houses may not have alley access or somewhere to stash the huge cans, and some streets or alleys may be too narrow for trucks to get to even the smaller 32-gallon cans that will be an option for some houses.
