Trash Cans

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.

"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.

Reducing trash a responsible choice Annie Linskey's article "Garbage pickup bill trashed at hearing as too restrictive" (April 8) inaccurately characterized the tenor of the City Council hearing on the city's "One Plus One" trash plan. The Department of Public Works has spent more than one year studying current trash service and household trash volumes. Our study indicates that most households that recycle can easily stay within the new 64-gallon weekly trash limit. Lobbyists for the real estate and landlord communities did voice concerns about new volume limits at the hearing, even as they registered support for the bill.

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.

Baltimore officials are developing plans to distribute 64-gallon trash cans to all city homes as a part of a proposal to reduce garbage pickup to once a week. The green heavy-duty plastic receptacles would include an attached lid to keep rats out and wheels for easy movement. Each city-owned can would have a bar code, assigning it to a specific address. The design of the cans enables garbage trucks to lift and empty them automatically, helping the city to "efficiently and effectively provide better services," said Mayor Sheila Dixon.

Launching the next step in what is expected to be a larger media campaign, Baltimore officials said yesterday that they will soon emblazon trash trucks and garbage cans with new slogans intended to reduce littering. The campaign is more edgy than past anti-litter efforts. One sign pictures a bedraggled rat hunched over text, "He loves when you put your trash out too early." Another sign, to be posted on trash cans, says, "Pick up the litter, lift up the city." "We're going to deliver this message to the public in any way that we can," said Mayor Sheila Dixon, who has made cleaning up the city a major theme of her tenure.