Is This You? Talking trash

Let’s talk some trash. Not trash talk like sports teams talk trash about other sports teams. I mean real trash. Garbage, litter, rubbish. Here we go ...

In your house you probably have a trash container somewhere in the kitchen area. After all, most household trash is from the kitchen area. Used paper towels, tin cans, milk jugs, egg shells and the like. What size of a container is probably in direct correlation to where you keep it and the amount of room you can allow for the container. A tiny kitchen or apartment will only hold a tiny, or maybe a medium sized, receptacle. So maybe the bigger the kitchen the bigger the garbage can. OK, it’s not really a can, but it just falls off the tongue easier to say “garbage can” instead of “garbage container.”

But you will never see a big garbage can in a huge fancy kitchen. The garbage is something that a fancy house would never show. There are those homes that hide the trash. The under-the-counter receptacle that has a door and opens for trash, like a monster eating its dinner. Some may be around the corner out of the way and out of the line of sight, on the back porch, or maybe even through a door out in the garage. But usually in most homes, it is just there. At the end of a counter or just to the right of the back door for easy removal. Ours is over past the refrigerator, and it is big. No, it’s huge. We seem to be an extra trashy household.

Somewhere along the way we moved from a cute little plastic thing with a swinging top that always had some sort of spill or sticky stuff on it, to a full-fledged 35-gallon blue Rubbermaid rectangular behemoth that we line with a 45, yes, a 45-gallon 3-mil thick black bag. We do not use the lid. I don’t even know where the lid is. A lid just gets in the way. A lid is for the outside trash, not the inside trash. A lid is to keep the dog or a stray raccoon out of the trash. There doesn’t seem to be any stray raccoons living in my kitchen.

My trash can will hold a full week’s worth of kitchen trash. Then, when it comes time to take out the trash, I can pull up on the bag to make it taller and add the stuff from the bathroom trash holders and trash from a basket I keep in the computer/office area, trash from the container in the spare room that holds leftovers from crafts and repairs and stuff. Before the bag goes out, I can even put in the disgusting goodies that are found in the bagless compartment of my vacuum cleaner. Even a quick extra cleaning of the cat box. Pee-ew!

Yes, sometimes it gets kinda heavy. In the winter I can be found by following the trail made from me dragging the bag through the snow to the dumpster in the yard. That doesn’t work too well in the summer, as the bag tends to rip and leave a gooey trail in the gravel that we have in our yard from the house to the dumpster. Not very attractive — unless you are a fly! Yum.

Yes, we have a full on dumpster in our yard. Told you we are kind of trashy. But in our defense, we have a shop and lots of yard waste from, well, the yard. Anyway. Just how much trash should the average household make? I mean, in our home there are just two of us but we have always created a large amount of trash. Should we really be filling a huge 45-gallon trash bag each week? If our trash is average, how much trash does a family of four or six or more create each week? Conjures up an interesting visual.

The world of trash is a balancing act. Say for instance you have trash day when the trash is picked up by your local disposal company and a week goes by and there is no pick up. The company has a break down or a driver gets sick. Then a second week goes by and there is no pick up again. Stuff can pile up pretty quickly and get a bit ripe, too. What would you do then? Maybe sneak a bag or two into the dumpster at work or the one you pass on your way to school? No, you would probably just keep piling it up because sooner or later that big ole truck will show up and take all your troubles away. You hope!

Or is all of this just more rubbish?

Trina lives in Eureka, Nevada. Share with her at itybytrina@yahoo.com. Really!