Trash Cans

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.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Tuesday will launch the city's Clean Community Competition, a block-by-block effort to rid neighborhoods of trash and to boost recycling. City officials and the Department of Public Works are challenging neighborhoods to spruce up the city. They are asking communities to join them in tackling sanitation problems and set a new standard for clean in Baltimore. All official community associations are eligible to participate in the friendly competition and vie for cash prizes that will benefit their neighborhoods.

I WAS SITTING at the kitchen table sipping my morning coffee when I heard a noise in the alley. First I heard a "wham!" Then came the throaty sound of a car engine gaining momentum.Both sounds were familiar. The "wham" sounded like our metal trash can taking a hit. The engine sounded like the one in the family station wagon.Sure enough, when I investigated, I found that once again one of our cars had clobbered one of our trash cans. The can was dented, and I was deflated. My elaborate trash-can defense system had failed.

OK, before you read this, you should know two things about me:  1) Before tonight, I liked meatballs. They were meaty and tasty and they made spaghetti better.  2) I'm generally opposed to bans. I'm usually for individual freedom and letting people make their own choices.  That said, after watching tonight's episode of "Jersey Shore," I must unequivocally call for a ban of meatballs. Not just from dinner tables. Or America. From Planet Earth.  Meatballs are not longer a tasty treat that improves tomato sauce.

The city is embarking on the second phase of a struggling effort to combat rats attracted to the garbage illegally dumped throughout the city. The Board of Estimates approved $320,000 yesterday to buy 55,334 trash cans that will be distributed directly to residents who will also receive information on proper trash disposal from the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods. Since December the city has distributed nearly 55,000 of the same black trash cans, bearing the word "Believe," to the neighborhoods of Oliver, Washington Village, Park Heights and Sandtown/Winchester.

I am playing the trash can game again.It goes like this: Somebody steals your trash cans. You prowl distant alleys vowing to find the missing cans. Eventually you call off your search and buy new cans. But you don't do this too quickly. If new cans appear too soon after the old ones have disappeared, the thieves are likely to return to the scene of the crime, and grab the new ones.This is either the third or fourth time in 16 years that my trash cans have been stolen. Looking at things on the bright side, my trash cans have an average life-span of about four years.

Call this the case of the $538 trash cans.Baltimore County Council Chairman Douglas B. Riley, R-4th, says he's mystified as to why the county plans to pay that much for trash cans on Eastern Boulevard in Essex.He asked central services director John E. Lutz Tuesday to look into why the county agreed in a Jan. 25 memorandum to reimburse the Essex Development Corp. $22,828 for replacing 38 trash cans along a six-block stretch. The price includes$20,444 for new cans and $2,384 for removing the old ones.

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake on Tuesday will launch the city's Clean Community Competition, a block-by-block effort to rid neighborhoods of trash and to boost recycling. City officials and the Department of Public Works are challenging neighborhoods to spruce up the city. They are asking communities to join them in tackling sanitation problems and set a new standard for clean in Baltimore. All official community associations are eligible to participate in the friendly competition and vie for cash prizes that will benefit their neighborhoods.

A day after the City Council balked at passing a tax on bottled beverages, officials said residents are likely to see more walls covered in graffiti, trash cans overflowing with garbage and vacant lots left to fester. The bottle tax would have raised $11.4 million toward closing the city's $121 million budget gap. Without that revenue, public works officials told a council subcommittee Friday, 31 workers will lose their jobs, and the impact on the city will be noticeable. "The real impact is on services," Celeste Amato, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works, said before the hearing of the labor subcommittee.

Two years ago, city officials thought they had found an answer. They distributed 100,000 trash cans to residents and made them pledge to toss their refuse in the plastic cans, not the streets. But the problem of inadequate trash-can use persists. Officials say residents are using the receptacles at dismal rates, as low as 20 percent in some neighborhoods. As a result, the city has an estimated 3.25 million rats. "We need to do something," said Elizabeth Weiblen, deputy director of the Mayor's Office of Neighborhoods.

A day after the City Council balked at passing a tax on bottled beverages, officials said residents are likely to see more walls covered in graffiti, trash cans overflowing with garbage and vacant lots left to fester. The bottle tax would have raised $11.4 million toward closing the city's $121 million budget gap. Without that revenue, public works officials told a council subcommittee Friday, 31 workers will lose their jobs, and the impact on the city will be noticeable. "The real impact is on services," Celeste Amato, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Works, said before the hearing of the labor subcommittee.

The wide alley that cuts between the backs of apartment blocks facing Dundalk's Lange Street and neatly kept rowhouses facing Berkshire Road constitutes, as Baltimore County's chief code enforcement officer calls it, "a tale of two cities." One side, for the most part, is littered with broken fences, unkempt yards and trash cans without lids, and with holes made by rats that gnawed through the plastic. The other side, for the most part, has trimmed yards, newly paved parking pads and trash cans, anchored to fence posts, with lids that lock.

Baltimore County begins single-stream recycling Monday, allowing a new assortment of materials to be placed in a single bin for pickup. Residents can use containers up to 34-gallon capacity, trash cans up to 34-gallon capacity or small cardboard boxes - not plastic bags. Paper and cardboard may also be tied in bundles with nonplastic string or placed in paper bags. Officials ask that residents remove lids and not use wheeled containers. And so they know it's for recycling, mark the containers with an "X" or "recycle," or pick up a sticker from Baltimore County senior centers or public libraries or the trash and recycling drop-off centers in White Marsh, Cockeysville, and Halethorpe.

The problem:: Trash cans in Southwest Baltimore have become a dumping site. The back story:: A well-intentioned idea to keep city gateways clean quickly turned into a nuisance on South Gilmor Street at Wilkens Avenue. "What was designed to be a good thing didn't turn out to be," said Anne Ames, who wrote to Watchdog to get two metal trash cans removed from her New Southwest/Mount Clare community. The metal cans with plastic liners were installed along with two park benches in the Wilkens Avenue median.

Disappearing cans, and a flawed trash policy When I first moved to my neighborhood in West Baltimore 22 years ago, I diligently put out my trash in metal cans with tight-fitting lids. After having four or five cans so badly dented by the trash men tossing them around that they were unusable, or having them stolen by who-knows-who in the first year, I reluctantly switched to setting my trash out in plastic bags. With the public information campaign by the city telling me that putting out trash in trash cans has always been the law and is now going to be strictly enforced, I purchased a sturdy, plastic wheeled and lidded container for $14.87 plus tax. Put my trash out in the new can the evening before trash day the first week of the new trash schedule.

If there was confusion, anger or absent-mindedness about Baltimore's new trash collection schedule, it didn't much show on city streets or alleys Monday morning. A few people in Wyman Park, Upper Fells Point and some Northern Parkway neighborhoods put out trash cans and bags, as they had done for years on Mondays, but mostly they didn't - apparently having got word that there was no pickup. Trash is now collected once a week, Tuesday through Friday depending on the address. The city has been calling and mailing notices for weeks about the changes.

OK, before you read this, you should know two things about me:  1) Before tonight, I liked meatballs. They were meaty and tasty and they made spaghetti better.  2) I'm generally opposed to bans. I'm usually for individual freedom and letting people make their own choices.  That said, after watching tonight's episode of "Jersey Shore," I must unequivocally call for a ban of meatballs. Not just from dinner tables. Or America. From Planet Earth.  Meatballs are not longer a tasty treat that improves tomato sauce.

Ease up, Doug Riley! With his criticism of the cost of trash cans for downtown Essex the Towson councilman is playing micromanagement games with the Baltimore County budget -- and probably roughing up some community feelings as well.After all, who is he to tell Essex how to allocate the funds it receives for streetscapes -- from trash cans and benches to street lights and brickwork in the sidewalks? If Essex wants to spend a bit more for its redwood trash cans that the pebbled-cement fixtures in Towson and compensate elsewhere, that seems to us a fair enough deal.

"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.