(no subject)

[conuly]

Poll #20354 So when you take out the trash....

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 129

View Respondents

How do you tie the handles?

View Answers

I cross one under the other, just like tying my shoes
93 (80.9%)

I loop them together, like tying up a loaf of bread or a pillowcase
11 (9.6%)

I don't
11 (9.6%)

Which of these terms are in your active vocabulary?

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Trash
99 (78.6%)

Garbage
98 (77.8%)

Rubbish
42 (33.3%)

How many times a month is trash pickup?

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Mean: 4.82 Median: 4 Std. Dev 3.25

0		1 (0.8%)
1		1 (0.8%)
2		8 (6.7%)
3		1 (0.8%)
4		87 (73.1%)
5		5 (4.2%)
6		1 (0.8%)
7		0 (0.0%)
8		9 (7.6%)
9		0 (0.0%)
10		1 (0.8%)
11		0 (0.0%)
12		1 (0.8%)
13		0 (0.0%)
14		0 (0.0%)
15		0 (0.0%)
16		0 (0.0%)
17		0 (0.0%)
18		0 (0.0%)
19		0 (0.0%)
20		4 (3.4%)

Do you have curbside recycling?

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Yes - metal, plastic, glass, and paper
95 (74.2%)

Yes - but not all those things
19 (14.8%)

No, but we can take them to collection events and drop-offs
9 (7.0%)

No
5 (3.9%)

Curbside compost?

View Answers

Yes!
37 (29.1%)

Yes, but only certain times of year
7 (5.5%)

No, but we have drop-off points for scraps
6 (4.7%)

Yes, but only certain times of year AND we have drop-off points for scraps year-round
4 (3.1%)

No
73 (57.5%)

Who pays for all this, anyway?

View Answers

We do
60 (46.9%)

The city/state does
38 (29.7%)

IDK
19 (14.8%)

Other
11 (8.6%)

Ticky?

View Answers

TICKY!
108 (100.0%)

********************

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Comments

[duskpeterson]

We live in a small apartment building, so we don't get recycling, darn it. Instead, I dump our recycling in the downtown recycling containers - you know, the ones they put out so that people walking by will toss their cups in them.

[conuly]

Is that... legal? You're not supposed to be household garbage in street bins in NYC.

[pauamma]

Over here, trash is picked up daily.

[magnetic_pole]

Oh, how lovely! M.

[musyc]

We don't have curbside compost, but I live in a rural area, so most of our veggie/fruit food scraps get tossed over the fence for the deer.

[konsectatrix]

6, because trash collection is once a week, which is privatised so we pay for it directly, and recycling is every other week and handled by the township (which I assume gets subsidized by the state, but I never bothered to look into it).

Also there was a span of 3 months when I trained myself to say rubbish because I was nannying a toddler with Aussie parents, and that was what she understood. Then I promptly trained myself out of it again, because I got SO many people asking me where I was from.

[conuly]

I bet you did!

[jtthomas]

Curbside compost here wouldn't get anything, because it's a farm town and pretty much everyone has their own compost barrel, heap, or bucket, all depending on the size of the garden. At that, we pay for the manure from the bigger farms.

[conuly]

Makes sense.

[boxofdelights]

A separate bin for yard waste is available, for an extra fee, and the garbage company will take that to a commercial yard-waste composting facility for you. There is no facility to compost kitchen waste, except your own composting bin in your own yard.

I was thrilled to see compostables get their own bin, next to the recyclables and the trash, in Montreal. It might just be part of the city though?

[conuly]

Do they really check to see if you put in some orange peels or apple cores in with your yard waste?

[pink_halen]

our High Rise building generates a lot of trash. There are, after all, 160 units. So Trash is picked up daily. A few years ago the building added a commingled recycling bin. It is supposed to be recycled but who knows.

[magnetic_pole]

Same here--daily pick up of both trash and recycling for an apartment building of about 140 units. M.

[julian]

We just moved, so i'm a bit muddled.

The town has weekly curbside pickup of trash, ditto recycling, for $280/year. As I understand it, this doesnt quite cover the contract cost, but covers enough for the town to be able to afford it.

However, my (small) apartment complex has a Dumpster, and doesn't buy into the town program.

I'm going to see if we can get a recycling bin for half cost, or something.

Also, in my idiolect, trash and garbage are equivalent, but rubbish is different. More food waste and composty things, i think.

[conuly]

Yeah, to me trash is mostly paper or non-recyclable plastics and other "clean" items, garbage is smelly and possibly leaky stuff, and rubbish is not a word I use.

[the_rck]

Trash pick up is once a week, always on the same day. That means that the number of times per month varies a little.

[conuly]

I didn't go by week in case some people are less than once a week, and I couldn't put more than 21 options on the scale either.

[silailo]

I just realized I don’t tie the handles. :[ I probably should. I would tie the handles when I lived with roommates, but I don’t now that I’m at home with my folks. I have no idea why I don’t.

[lilysea]

Australia:

rubbish (red-lid bins) is picked up once/week - paid for by council rates, which are paid by home-owners/landlords, but not by renters.

recycling (yellow-lid bins) - glass, cardboard, metal, certain plastics - is picked up once a fortnight/every 2 weeks. paid for by council rates.

You can also get a free giant metal "skip bin" (I think the US term is dumpster?) outside your house a few times a year for old furniture, branches etc - again, paid for by council rates. There are certain things that MUST NOT go in the skip bin including asbestos; building waste; certain chemicals.

There are collection points at local council offices for recycling lightbulbs and other speciality recyling items.

You can also recycle certain specialty things at Officeworks (stationary store) and Ikea.

[conuly]

Council rates?

If big things are picked up in NYC, we have to schedule with 311, but it's just an online clicky thing.

[stardreamer]

We don't use the kind of garbage bags that have handles, so that question threw me for a loop for a minute. Trash pickup is once a week, recycling every other week (on the same day as trash pickup). Our recycling doesn't include glass, but there's a place where we can take the glass to dump it. The city provides us a trash bin and a recycling bin. I think if you generate a lot of trash there's a procedure for requesting a second trash bin, possibly for a fee.

The city also does heavy trash pickup (anything that won't fit in the bin, including furniture) a couple of times a year, and yard waste pickup every couple of months; you can find the schedule for these on their website. The scavengers have a field day with heavy trash (picking up things for resale), and we've acquired a few things that way ourselves.

[conuly]

What sort of bags do you use, then?

[lilly_c]

On my street we have commercial sized black bins for rubbish and same sized silver bins for recycling and both are collected a few times a week due to one side of the street been tenements and one side houses. We also have small cubby bins for food waste those aren’t collected as regular as the other bins are.

We pay for this (Scotland) via council tax, that particular tax is very devisive both here and rUK with it been brought in by Thatcher’s government in the 1980s and the yearly total are still set inline with 1980s house prices.

[conuly]

Could be good or bad depending on if your house value has gone up or down, I guess.

[naye]

Other: Sweden is real big on recycling and also burns garbage for energy that heats our buildings. So we (apartment dwellers) have an "Environment Building" by the building parking lot. It has the required receptacles for burnables (= energy) and compost (= biofuel), which are put in the municipality's plastic bags (white/black to tell burnables from bio). There's also recycling/pickup receptacles for:
- cardboard
- paper
- plastic
- metal
- clear glass
- colored glass
- small electronics
- batteries

People keep being terrible and not flattening their cardboard and stacking the bins even after they're full, so the landlord has threatened to take all those away. Then we'd have to make our way to the local recycling center a few blocks away, or to one of the municipal dumps (also focused on recycling really).

I think house owners have set pickup days - we don't.

And that's probably more than anyone wanted to know about our trash situation!

[conuly]

Is the landlord *allowed* to take bins away?

[darkoshi]

Trash and yard waste (not kitchen scraps - those go in the trash or in your own compost pile) once a week, recycling every other week.
For large items like mattresses and furniture, we can call to schedule a pickup. There are occasional collection events for other items like electronics and hazardous chemicals.

[reynardo]

We pay for the rubbish collection through our rates. So the city pays, out of money they've collected from us.

[senmut]

I said other, because WE do as part of our city taxes/utility fees, but the city subsidizes some of it too to keep the fees moderate.

[conuly]

Paying through taxes is the city paying, really.

[kareina]

I had to choose 0 because you didn't have an option for "once every 8 weeks", which is how often they come to collect our "branbart" (literally "burnable", but in Sweden this term is uses for all rubbish that isn't recycling, compost, or special disposal (like motor oil, batteries, light bulbs, computer components, etc.). However, they take the compost much more often than that!

[conuly]

I should hope you're not keeping food in the house two months before you can toss it. Pee-yew!

[oloriel]

Some specifications to my answers:

- Garbage bags here tend to come with strings, so I tie those. If they don't have strings, I tie the handles/corners like I'd tie my shoes.

- I say trash or garbage for the trash, and rubbish for small pieces of trash OR for stuff that's lying around where it shouldn't. Or when someone talks rubbish. You know how it is.

- "General" trash is picked up every other week; one of those times they also pick up "packaging" trash (metal and paper), and then there's an additional day for "paper" pick-ups. So that's a total of three.

- Plastic and paper have special bins (or sacks) that you put out on pick-up day. Glass is collected in central drop-off containers which also exist for paper (if you have too much for your bin or your town doesn't collect your paper trash). Once or twice a year, the town collects bulky waste. There are regular drop-off days for toxic waste. Metal scraps and broken electronics are also regularly collected by freelancing salvagers, or you can bring them to the local junkyard (this may cost an extra fee or be free of charge, depending on the town's finances).

- If you don't have your own compost, you get a "bio waste" bin that's emptied alongside your "general" tash. For huge amounts of compost that don't fit in the bin, there are monthly drop-off days. An exception is made for dead Christmas trees, which are collected in early January.

- The town raises an annual waste disposal charge to pay for the whole thing. The charge varies depending on the size of your bin, whether or not you need a "bio waste" bin, and the frequency of collection (if you don't produce a lot of "general" trash, you can opt out of the biweekly collection and instead have your trash collected only once a month or even just every six weeks).

- I'll shut up now! At last!

[conuly]

Complex!

[redbird]

I don't know whether the trash pickup from this building is a city service, or private carting but included in my rent; either way, we don't get a separate bill for it. I do know that the trucks have slide-out arms that fit into the dumpster at the bottom of our parking lot, lift it into the air, and dump the contents into the truck. It's impressive to watch (and not really an answer to your question).

[conuly]

It sounds impressive.

[peoriapeoriawhereart]

Note:No curbside compost, but there is curb brush collection though that's not as often as the trash and recycling pickup.

[conuly]

Brush?

[stormkeeper_lovedoris]

On the first question, we don't use plastic (or any) garbage bags. We stuff the garbage into old pillow cases and then dump it in the big dumpsters that the city gives us.

[conuly]

...what do you do when you run out of pillowcases?

[antisoppist]

UK. Paid for by us through our council tax.

Where I live, rubbish bins are kerbside collection fortnightly, food waste and recycling (paper, card, glass, metal and some but not all plastic) is collected weekly.

On the other fortnight there is a kerbside garden waste collection which you have to pay £45 a year for, but obviously not everyone needs that. I paid for it this year when the amount I was chopping off my shrubs threatened to take over the bit of the garden I was attempting to compost it in. You get a separate green bin for that with a sticker each year to show you have paid.

We also have a charity shop that takes books and clothes, and you can take bigger stuff to the tip if you have a car.

My kitchen bin bags have a drawstring and I tie that in a knot before putting them in my black wheelie bin in the garden and I wheel that out to the kerb every second Tuesday.

[conuly]

Paid through tax is the same as the city paying, as their revenues are largely taxes, aren't they?

[topaz_eyes]

Our city has had seasonal weekly compost pickup for years (April-November). We also have 2 compost piles in our back yard for winter compost.

This year the city finally began curbside recycling! \0/ Previously we'd schlepp down to a recycling depot every 3-4 weeks with a truckload of recycling. The curbside pickup does not include glass but we still have the depots for that. The depots also handle electronics, which is nice. About twice a year there are household hazardous waste dropoffs. We pay a charge on our utility bill, but the city subsidizes the rest.

For the really big garbage that can't be put in the household bin (which is large enough to hold 2 people, I swear), we can take it to the landfill ourselves.

[conuly]

NYC keeps trialling yard composting, but then untrialling it :(

Curbside recycling is always nice!

[lusentoj]

Here in Japan (at least, where I live) the cost of trash and recycle pick-up is covered by that you have to buy specially-marked trash bags, so it's not a service you have to specially purchase. But large trash is handled by a different company and then you need to pay extra.

Also Japanese bags have two sets of handles, one normal one and one slightly smaller inner one, you're supposed to tie the inner one and then tie the outer one "overtop" it.

[conuly]

Two sets of handles. Seems... excessive.