Waste Management

Waste Management

I know it is a new month and a new year but I’ll be damned if I know what day of the week it is. Wait, I hear the trash truck out front. Must be Thursday. It is 6:00 am and our house is the first stop for the garbage pick-up. I’d like to go out there and give the assholes on the truck a piece of my mind. No, actually I’d like to go to the Waste Management offices and let loose there, verbally, of course! The guys on the truck are just worker bees. It’s the bosses and the politicians who are to blame for this pre-daybreak disturbance.

 

Just for the hell of it I did some research into the noise regulations of Martin county to see what laws are being broken by starting an industrial strength noise in a neighborhood at 6 o’clock in the morning. There are tons of reg’s. Everything from allowable decibel levels and noise crossing a property line to hours of work allowed. These laws apply to individuals, manufacturing establishments, construction operations, birthday parties, etc. This was a not a surprise to me but what was a surprise was that none of it applies to the garbage pick-up operation. This comes under the heading of “except for county authorized waste removal”! So, this monster vehicle with horrible brakes and ear shattering reverberating motor and transmission can do its damnedest as early as it wants to…It can cruise up and down the street at 6:00 am in order to clear the yard waste or crush living room furniture or empty bins of bottles and cans that clatter with the impact of tympani. It can sound its beeping back-up signal-which can be heard as far as the launch pad at Cape Canaveral- and the sleeping residents of the community be damned.

Also ridiculous is the fact that the truck crew consists of two men. One driving and one doing all the picking up. The truck cruises down the street in one direction getting all the cans, etc from that one side and then it cruises back the other way picking up the other side. On days when there is both a trash pick up and a recycle pick up that behemoth comes through four times!  I suppose the company would claim that this is so the picker-upper does not have to cross the path of incoming traffic to grab the cans, and I suppose that may be true BUT, how does the crew that rides the truck up north do it? There are two guys riding the back of the truck there and I presume they have an acceptable safety record. I think safety is not the real issue. I think it is economics. I think an analysis of the operation would show that the additional time, wear and tear on the truck, and gasoline is less than the cost of a second crew member on the back of the truck. I might be wrong but I am pretty sure the discomfort of the community is not a part of the equation.

Trash/garbage is an interesting topic for me. I am not sure why but it fascinates me. I think we make too much trash and waste way too much. I find the name of the hauler used by this community-and many other communities through out the country- to be incongruous. “Waste Management” implies there is a real plan behind its operation and a goal of some sort, which is partially true. Its goal is to make money. Its plan is to make the trash disappear. Aside from that there is no management involved. Judging from the mountains of our landfills there is far too little actual though or management where waste is concerned, and waste management doesn’t begin with the trash truck cruising our streets at 6:00am weekly. It starts with controlling the ungodly amounts of packaging we consume and discard, the plant material we discard so we can have manicured lawns and trees, food we throw away, endless streams of home furnishings, office supplies, toys, clothing, you name it, we consume that all ends up as trash, and so long as it disappears we feel we have managed it. We have not. Perhaps we’re not thinking clearly because we were awakened at 6:00 am by the trash truck on its forth pass through our neighborhood.