Yesterday was my normal garbage pick up day. Since we have curbside compost collection where I live, I put my bag of food scraps and other compostable material in my green waste bin, and my regular garbage in my garbage bin, and put both bins on the curb. When I got home from work yesterday the garbage bin was more or less where I’d left it, but the green waste bin was gone. Nowhere to be found.
This is very strange. Did someone steal it? Why would anyone steal a garbage bin? Did my neighbor mistakenly bring it in to their yard thinking it was theirs? You’re think they’re remember whether they put their own bin out that morning, or at least noticed they now had two of them. And I looked and didn’t my bin among their garbage bins.
I live across the street from a school, and parents park on the street in front of my house when picking up and dropping off their kids. Sometimes they will move the bins so they can park in that spot, but when they do that they’ve always left them in my yard, or driveway, or sometimes on the sidewalk (which annoys me, because now it makes me look like a jerk who blocked the sidewalk). But it’s completely gone.
Well, city technically. I don’t know if it was damaged because I can’t locate it to assess whether it was damaged or not.
This was my first thought as well. I’ve never lost a bin this way, but had to walk a little ways down the street to recover them a couple times. I’ve also acquired a couple decent bbq grill covers when they blew into my yard.
Only mentioned because we had a badly damaged county trash bin, and one week it vanished with the trash, and the next pickup day they dropped off a new one.
Are the bins emptied into the truck manually, or with a hydraulic arm operated by the driver from the cab? We have the hydraulic system here, and it is often a bit jerky - managed to fling one of our bins over the top of the truck and across the street! Driver just kept on going… I can imagine that occasionally a bin gets dropped into the truck. Oops, sorry?
Ah. It was in good condition, but it is an older style bin – it’s black in color, while the ones the city currently issues are green. I suppose it’s possible they’re phasing out the old black bins, and they’ll be giving me a new green one soon. If they’re what they’re doing it would be nice if they’d told me, though.
A hydraulic arm. I didn’t think of that, but I guess that is a possibility.
With the hydraulic arm they do occasionally end up dumped in the truck along with the trash, I have seen that before. Or maybe people steal them when they move in rather than wait for their own to be delivered. Or given the school traffic, maybe somebody hit your bin with their car and took off with it to hide the evidence.
That shouldn’t be an issue. Here we’re supposed to leave the bins at the house when we move, for the next occupant to use. These bins were actually in my garage when I moved in.
I think you are in the same city as I am. The city is pretty responsive to requests to have bins exchanged, like if one is damaged. A guy drives around on collection day with a trailer full of bins. You have to call the city to do this - perhaps a neighbor asked for an exchange and yours got picked-up by mistake (or they were returning an extra green waste bin, which costs extra) - could happen if you placed it near where it may be difficult to determine which house it belongs to. Call the city and explain what occurred, I am sure they will have another one out to you before next week’s collection.
One time I heard a scraping noise on the road in front of our house, looked out and saw a vehicle going down the street with a trash bin stuck to its front bumper. The driver looked in no hurry to dislodge the bin.
Also “One Of My Garbage Bins Went Missing” is a lousy title for a cinematic thriller.
Our trash truck absolutely mangled our bin once. I swear the arm crushed it, and then the truck driver backed over it just to make sure. I had to call the City and have them come replace it. It’s entirely possible that they thrashed your bin and took it with them as a result, and a new one will show up to replace it.
Or the other possibility is that someone else is at the point of bin replacement where they’ll get charged, and they went a-stealing to avoid the charge for a new bin. Around here, you only get replacement bins on an interval without actually being charged. It’s like one replacement bin every six years or something like that.
That happened to me once (beige to gray) but we were informed first and on the day there was a big truck doing the switch following the garbage truck. One time my recycyle bin disappeared so I called the trash service and they said that it happens from time to time and they’d give me a new one and then a few hours later it reappeared. I know it was the same one because there was an envelope stuck to the bottom that was my junk mail. I called them back and told them that my prodigal can was back.
It’s one of those movies that starts out with a mundane happening, and then the owner of the missing bin investigates, uncovers a murder or two, and a terrorist plot, and ends up saving the President from assasination.
Oh, and finds try love along the way, of course, probably with someone who had been kidnapped by the terrorists and indoctrinated, but gradually comes to see the error of their ways by gradually falling for the hero, and ends up taking a bullet for the President but survives! (Or, dies in the hero’s arms, depending on the advance screenings.)
The hero returns home, ecstatically joined by their new love (or, mourning the senselessness of it all, depending on the advance screenings), and finds a bright new blue recycling bin in their driveway.
