Your old trash cans bred, and had a baby.
You’re a Grandparent!
Mazel Tov!
(How I wish we still had the Jewish Smilie for moment like this one!)
And I thought that the new arrival was going to be the Cooler of Death’s trashier cousin or something…
Actually they do have those programs in some municipalities in North America too (at least in the U.S. and Canada), with clear garbage bags being mandatory for household waste. There are some provisions for privacy issues.
Please tell me there’s more to this story. 
You have to separate your garbage far more thoroughly than that! The totally clear bags are for recyclables only, so there’s no personal details on anything. As in our area recycle day is only twice a month, we wash all our cans, bottles and so on so they don’t stink. Our nice new rules say that we only have to divide it into two bags now - before every single different kind of trash had to be in its own bag. Now we can put PET plastic, aluminium, steel, coloured and plain glass into one bag. All other plastic goes in another and it’s amazing how much there is…Newspapers, books, magazines and cardboard are stacked and tied. On the other two weeks a month we put out unburnable rubbish, which these days isn’t much, now that all plastic has gone recycleable. These days its just stuff like dead batteries (which have to be put out in their own little bag!) small electrical stuff and trash with mixed ingredients that you can’t separate. Twice a week we have a collection of “raw” garbage though in this town we are encouraged to compost and we can get huge discounts off compost bins by going to the city office for a coupon. Garden rubbish goes on these days too though again you are asked to compost what you can.In this town we pay for the bags so it’s up to you how many you put out. They are not so expensive at about 2 dollars for 10 45 litre bags. I usually put out one or two in each collection.
The bags are mostly clear though, so if you want to protect your identity you get a shredder. In our last apartment we had trouble with people chucking unsorted crap into the communal dumpster which resulted in a rule that you had to put your name and apartment number on each bag, and there was a rota for people to stand and check stuff being tossed on trash day. Lovely on a hot summer’s day. There were so many people though that my turn only came once a year so it wasn’t too bad and MUCH better than walking past rotting crap for a week at a time…
No, it wouldn’t. Paper isn’t garbage. Where I live, we can’t put any paper in the garbage. Stuff that’s in the garbage, is really garbage. Paper goes in the recycling. Yes, we have a shredder.
On posting, I see it’s been mentioned upthread already. Carry on!
When my family broke up (My sister and I moved out of the house, my grandfather had died, my grandmother insisted on being put into a retirement community, and my parents divorced) we were all understandably under a lot of stress. A lot of trash was generated by the moving-out process. Way more than we normally would have been expected to put at the curb.
We were not normally charged per bag, but anything over about three bags was supposed to be arranged in advance for an extra charge. There was normally some leeway however.
My father didn’t want to pay, and nobody was together enough to have made arrangements anyway. We had about twenty bags of trash.
So the night before we moved out, my father went about the neighborhood after dark, depositing a single bag of trash at each neighbor’s curb, like some kind of horrible reverse Santa Claus.
One of our weirder moments.
Sailboat
We have had amusing threads on how to get rid of old trash cans, because the garbage men don’t take them. I thought this may have been one of those threads.
My dad had Foreign Garbage on his curb once. Not wanting to be charged, etc, he called the cops. They opened the garbage and found the address it came from and WROTE THEM A TICKET!
My dad lives in constant fear of Garbage Retaliation.
Surprisingly, no - that was the end of the dumping, and there was no additional drama.
I have a feeling that they were sharing the love and spreading their extra bags out as much as they could - and maybe couldn’t be sure exactly who had responded. Or maybe they knew. I don’t know. Anyway, I never heard anything more about it.
For the number of times I had to handle their disgusting trash (either through obsessive digging, or cleaning up after birds that had a field day with extra bags not picked up,) I really relished the thought of them having to deal with their huge stinking mess all at once.
I once put my trashcan across the street. My city went to a company that uses one-man trucks with a hydraulic can grabber on the right side of the truck. One Monday, I just missed the truck’s run down my side of the street, so I rolled my can over to the other side. Ten minutes later, my can was empty, and I retrieved it. There’s no per-can charge here. The great thing about the “robot” trucks is that you can overload the huge cans. The truck doesn’t care that the can contains 200 pounds of rock and dirt.
Our recyclables go into blue plastic tubs, which are picked up before dawn by a three man truck. The city has a composting center for yard waste and limbs. They sell the resulting compost for cheeeeap.
Were you entirely certain there was trash in there? :dubious:
I’d give them my old cans and buy new ones for myself. They’re $15 or so and well worth it if it’ll keep the trash out of the alley. Consider it a belated “Welcome to the neighborhood” gift.
I found out that I have been the topic of “neighborhood gossip” because I never put out any garbage. I take mine to work, since I never fill my office dumpster.
There is absolutely no way I would put up with crap like that.
In our city, the public works dept. provides 2 wheeled trash cans. A blue one for regular trash and a green one for recyclables. The crew that picks up the recycling bins sorts and separates it.
Recycling is fine, but don’t ask me to spend more time dealing with my trash than it took to consume the contents thereof.