It is trash pick-up morning and recycling pick-up morning. A good morning. Our trash is collected twice a week and our recycling once a week which usually means we anticipate Friday nights for reclaiming the area under our kitchen sink from the bottles and cartons and cans that have been waiting there. It is a happy time.
I am not sure if this is an "Only In New York" thing, but the trash rules around here are pretty strict. There are designated trash enforcement folks (police, I imagine) that walk the blocks on trash mornings and survey the garbage. If you break the rule, you get a ticket.
You can get a ticket for putting recyclables in trash bags, instead of recycling bags. For putting out large bulky items on days that are not Large Bulky Days. For putting your trash against the building, instead of at the curb.
These rules are okay by me. I can see how the trash in New York can easily get out of hand. I can see why they want people to do things a certain way. But, one drawback to the system is some recent neighborhood trash revelry.
In the past month, our building has gotten two trash tickets. Both of which were for things that no one in our building did. One Saturday morning there was a horribly ugly couch sitting in front of our building on a non-bulky day. The couch did not belong to anyone in our building. It sort of makes sense to me that if someone needed to get rid of a couch, they would drag it to someone else's trash pile (but I guess it makes equal sense that after seeing a ticket for a couch at the curb that suddenly it did not belong to anyone in the building...). So, a $100 ticket was taped to our front door. And the couch was not picked up.
Luckily this is something that our landlord dukes out with the trash people and we don't need to worry about it.
We were looking forward to this trash day in particular because we were out of town last week and have several weeks of holiday recycling madness that have taken over our home. Add to that the decluttering of the January Reorganization Project and you can see why I considered crafting a cute countdown calendar for trash day. One item in particular that we needed to go out was our broken filing cabinet. Dave took it apart, stacked the slabs of particle board, taped them into a bundle and hauled them out. We followed the rules. We should be fine.
I just heard the trucks. I think we are clear.
But I'm going to check for tickets anyway.
5 comments:
Why can't I just reach into the screen and grab a muffin? I couldn't concentrate on your trash talk at all. I think you've inspire me to bake today...
Well, did you get a ticket?
YUM!
No ticket yet. But the trash guys are remarkably late today. It was the recycling guys I heard. I think if we were going to get one, we would have by now.
confession: I have eaten 3 muffins. Well, I'd say Sprout and I shared 3. I feel like I didn't get much of what we shared. It's one of those days.
Robyn, What a fabulous blog! Your pictures look scrumptous...
Funny thing, we've been living in Brooklyn for almost 3 years now and never knew about these strict rules and fines until just this week, when our neighbor across the street put some plastic take-out containers into the pile. We're so committed to recycling that we too often OVER-recycle and put things in there that we know don't get accepted by the city but that SHOULD (perhaps hoping that it will magically enter the system and not be discarded or ruin the whole pile). They'll see no more of that now from us!
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