The Self-righteousness of Garbage

My local municipality is getting into garbage recycling in a big way.

After months of preparation -- or preconditioning as we call it in the public manipulation business -- they sent around our new green bins. Whoopee!

The green bins, I find, take little more than I usually throw into my backyard composter. A few chicken bones maybe, and some soiled paper products. But otherwise it's the same stuff I put in the big black recepticle behind the potato patch. I compost food and garden waste because I want the humus, not because I'm some kind of morally superior being. There's no way I'm giving my good stuff to the town.

Imagine my disappointment, then, when I received my green bin kit. All this build up about these great new green bins, all for nothing. Now I'm stuck with a couple of plastic recepticles I don't need and a one-inch-thick pile of documents extolling the virtues of recycling.

At the end of the day, all I get out of this over-hyped exercise is half my usual garbage collection. Because, in conjunction with the green bin foofarah, my town has cut real garbage collection down to once every two weeks to encourage us to compost. Instead of four bags a week, which I never use anyway, I can now put out four bags every two weeks. If I go over that limit, I can buy (surprise, surprise -- there's a price attached to these changes!) garbage tags at a very reasonable price.

So...I've got useless bins that I've got to store someplace, reduced services and new charges for services that used to be free. Did I mention that my taxes went up some godawful percentage again this year...yet another godawful increase in a string that goes on and on and on?

There's a survey that goes with the green-bin handouts, too, asking me what I think should be the future of garbage disposal in my prissy little burg. Well...how about you pick up the garbage on time and take it away? And how about you stop bugging me about garbage -- telling me what to put out, how to arrange it, when to put it out and how to process it so that your lazy supplier will lower himself to actually pick it up?

Bad enough that we have to put up this thinly disguised money-grab, but must we also listen to the cheek-puffing moralistic jive that comes with it? To hear them tell it, town fathers have embarked on a crusade to save the world from the evils of indiscriminate garbage disposal. Actually, they've embarked on a crusade to raise revenue, cut costs, reduce service and avoid dealing with any real problems that might cost them votes. Plus ca change, eh?

Municipalities have very few jobs to do, and garbage collection is one of them. So why in God's name do they insist in making such a big freaking deal out of it?

The answer is that garbage has become a big problem because a) it costs money to get rid of it and b) no one can figure out how to impose a new landfill site or incinerator on an unwilling neighbourhood.

Politicians have learned to deflect the problem by simply making e a big moral issue out of it. Garbage is BAD. BAD people make garbage. BAD people should be punished. They guilt honest taxpayers into spending hours processing their own garbage, and they charge taxpayers for the privilege of doing so. As a side benefit, politicians and officals also avoid the cost and effort of finding ways to dispose of garbage.

Sweet!

Well, I'm sick of it. I have too few free hours in the day as it is and I don't want to spend them washing cans and cutting up cardboard boxes. I dislike town councillors who think they can dictate how and when I should set out my garbage, in what quantity and in which containers. I detest the officious, obnoxious tone in their voices, and their Maoist attitude to the whole garbage issue.

For heaven's sake! This is a town. It's not the Queen of England. I pay this town good bucks to deliver a few critical services and I damn well expect to get those services. I don't expect to get haranged and insulted and treated like the second cousin of trailer trash.

So, folks, stop bugging me with your green bins and your garbage tags. Give me something I need. Something that meets my needs instead of yours and actually makes my life better. Or build an incinerator, burn the damn garbage and shut up about it. Do your job. Enough, already.