Garbage

This is for all JV football players: Your game today has been canceled. JV cheerleading practice has also been canceled. "That was actually a short poem - you could type that up and call it 'Football Announcement,' " said Terence Winch as he listened to a voice come over the loudspeaker during his talk on poetry at Centennial High School on Wednesday. Winch - a writer and poet who is also well-known to fans from his days as the button accordionist of Irish folk band Celtic Thunder - wasn't joking.

The city's new recycling plan is exceeding expections, officials say, with trucks picking up 53 percent more recyclables since July, when Mayor Sheila Dixon increased collections to once a week. "I really thought it would take a little bit longer to get to this point," Dixon said in an interview. "People have taken heed. People are really getting into the groove of this process." The mayor's plan also reduced garbage collection to once a week and now city garbage trucks are hauling less trash to the landfills.

New routes, a pared trash-pickup schedule and expanded recycling, all starting this week, mark some of the biggest changes to city sanitation in decades. Among the changes: * The city is discontinuing Monday pickup. * Garbage will only be collected once a week. There is a limit of 96 gallons, or about three cans, on the amount of trash you can set out. Trash must be set out in cans with tight-fitting lids. * Recycling will be collected once a week. There is no limit on the amount of recycling you can set out. * Garbage and recycling must be placed outside no later than 6 a.m. - rather than 7 a.m. - the day of collection.

The sun had only begun to cast shadows Friday as garbage collectors jumped into their trucks to begin routes that have remained virtually unchanged for more than 40 years. But starting Monday, sweeping changes will come to Baltimore's sanitation routine. City garbage and recycling crews will be placed on newly drafted routes, and trash and recycling will each be picked up once a week, instead of the former schedule, when trash was picked up twice a week and recycling once every two weeks.

"Mankind is ... a manifold opening of the possibilities of growth and an infinite capacity for wasteful consumption." - Georges Bataille (1967) There is something distinctly human about trash. Zoologists and entomologists have found many connections between humans and animal behavior, primate psychology, even the DNA of fruit flies. So far, though, there is no evidence that hordes of bees, colonies of ants or herds of elephants are endangered by their own junk. Only human civilizations pose such a threat to themselves.

The pile of televisions waiting for recycling at the Eastern Sanitation Yard in Baltimore - many of them wrapped in wood paneling popular in decades past - is likely to get larger today when the nation completes its switch to digital TV. City officials hope so. The rate of electronic waste, or e-waste, is growing, but more than 80 percent of unwanted TVs and computers nationwide are still thrown into the trash, and watchdogs worry that more will...

Our view Mayor Sheila Dixon's plan to switch municipal trash collection to once a week while boosting recycling pickup is the right thing to do. It saves $7 million and frees up sanitation crews to clean the city's filthy alleys. And it will encourage people, by necessity, to recycle more, which is good both for the environment and for Baltimore's bottom line - stowing trash in a landfill isn't free, after all. The mayor does, however, need to follow through on providing residents with sturdy trashcans with attached tight-fitting lids.

The word is out and the anxiety is growing. In neighborhoods rich and poor, black and white, neat and messy Baltimoreans are keenly aware that a decades-old, twice-a-week rhythm of their lives is about to be disrupted. Soon the garbage trucks that pick up their trash will clatter down their streets just once a week. Oh, another truck will come a couple of days later, but it will only take recyclables, those mostly non-offending papers, boxes, bottles and cans - not the crab shells, baby diapers, cat litter, moldy bread and bruised spinach you don't want sitting around for the week in between pickups.

Somerset Democrats didn't slight minorities I live and work in Somerset County and I am a member of the Democratic Central Committee. I have read with great interest your article and editorial concerning racial disparities in Somerset County. While I agree with the gist of the article, I must take strong issue with using the recent appointment of James East to the Somerset County Board of Commissioners as an example implying that blacks and other minorities are specifically excluded from holding high office in our county.

Before a vote to cut trash collection to once a week, Baltimore City Councilman Nick D'Adamo didn't just raise the specter of illegal dumping. He copped to it. D'Adamo announced at a City Council meeting this week that after he and his family polish off a crab dinner, they don't wait for the trash truck to come along to get rid of the shells. "When I eat crabs, I take it to the closest Dumpster," D'Adamo said, according to The Baltimore Sun's Annie Linskey. "Or I take them to the nearest municipal trash can."