In most cases, I wouldn’t care because our city trash charges a flat fee added on to the water bill, so it’s not costing anybody anything extra. In my neighborhood everybody keeps their bins in their side yard until the evening before trash day, then they go out to the curb.
So, on trash day, before the truck has come, and it doesn’t cause the bin to overflow, no problem. After the truck has come and my bin is empty, then hell no. Same for dog shit bags. Before pick up, fine. But I don’t want to sniff your dog’s shit every time I use the bin for a week until the next pick up.
The house next to us used to be rented out by the room, mostly to college students or other young adults. They generated a lot of trash, sometimes too much for their bins. I know some of that trash ended up in our bins, because sometimes I saw it there.
I would not have minded, except that our trash bin was often already full, so they would put unrecyclable trash in our recycling bin. Or non-compostable trash in our compostable bin.
I finally had to complain to the property owners. Mirabile dictu, the practice stopped. Even more miraculously, they stopped renting the property and one of the owners and his family moved in there. Nice people.
I used to live in a townhouse development - two rows of two story buildings on either side of a driveway the length of a football field. I lived alone at the end of the drive. Each townhouse had its own wheeled bin that had to be taken out to the road each week and left at the curb. Since I create hardly any garbage, and the bins being designed for a family, I told whoever happened to be living opposite me to use my bin for their garbage. So I took the bin for its weekly trip and brought it back and my neighbors didn’t ever have to.
One of the women that lived there had to be talked into putting her garbage in my bin because her rubbish was “pretty smelly.” I pointed out that mine wasn’t all crushed rose petals either.
People are concerned that their trash cans smell bad?! They keep them outside, right? I just open the lid and throw my bags in, I never have any occasion to stick my head in and take a whiff.
I guess we are fortunate to have garbage socialism in Chicago; the city picks your trash up and supplies the trash cans; AFAIK, they will give you as many as you say you need. So there’s no financial incentive to encroach on your neighbor’s trash can. It only happens if people happen to have generated more trash than usual in a particular week, and it’s never created any problems for me.
I must have lived a sheltered life. Until this thread, I have not heard of regularly taking household trash away from home to deposit somewhere else (except for vacation homes). I guess I assumed every urban residence had regular trash collection as a standard utility/service (at least offered). Ignorance fought.
I think there are different levels of smelling bad. There’s the normal “that’s a trash can” smell, which is different than “smeared dog poop marinating in an enclosed hot and humid space” smell.
How do you and your neighbor pay for trash pickup? If it’s a mandatory charge, like part of your tax bill or free, why bother – just get your own trash container and be a good neighbor.
If pickup is for a fee, why not work out an arrangement with your neighbor to share the cost? My family did that years ago (in another location). Two neighbors got together, split the cost, and we put all our trash in their cans, with their permission and knowledge. Since the combined trash amount didn’t exceed the minimum each time, both parties benefited from half-price pickup costs. We just didn’t tell the city; one household subscribed to the municipal service and one did not (officially). Nothing wrong with that.
We have a couple of neighbors with whom we agree to put extra garbage in their can - on weeks that one of us has too much and the other empty space. It is understood that the garbage won’t be really messy or stinky - like construction waste or something else that will require rinsing out the can. We do the same for yard waste - our stupid town allows you 2 free bundles of sticks each week. So if you do a bunch of trimming, you text a couple neighbors and drop 2 bundles on everyone’s lawn.
I have a dog and always pick up after him. I never understood why people are so against bagged waste put in their cans when the cans are out by the curb and going to be picked up that day. But I understand that people are like that, so I don’t do it. Hell, I’m sure I have some unfounded pet (heh) peeves of my own.
People who talk about how smelly dog poop is are IMO&E greatly exaggerating the fact. The bags are plastic. I put it on my hand and pick up the shit. ZERO shit or smell transfers to my hand. I tie the bag in a knot. If I have a way to go, the bag goes in a jacket pocket. Again - NO transfer of waste/odor. They fully contain the material and smell - certainly for less than a day. But you snowflakes think a little knotted bag of waste sitting on top of your trash somehow fouls your can?
Maybe if it was in your can for days in superhot temps… Or if the bag broke. But don’t be ridiculous and suggest that a knotted plastic bag would foul your can over the course of a few hours - whatever is in the bag.
But, you are certainly free to be unreasonable and unrealistic, and I will certainly do what I can to avoid upsetting you.
Yeah, dropping a bag of poop in a can that was otherwise empty is an inexcusably dickish move.
I had an experience with this last year. I took the garbage out and realized that someone had filled my recycle bin to over-flowing with trash. It takes me a good month to fill that thing up - it’s about four feet tall - and it had just been emptied. Now it was full of stuff like dead potted plants, old rotted wood pieces, rusted tools, disintegrating boxes of junk. You can get your recycle bin taken away if you have trash in it and I was so pissed that someone had done this and I was going to have to dump that shit and bag it to put in my garbage bin. Then a neighbor came up and said he saw what happened. A house across the street was being flipped and some people were cleaning out the garage and sheds. They had taken my bin and another neighbor’s to use. He had tried to tell them they couldn’t do that but they didn’t speak English and ignored him.
A few hours later I saw some workers at the house. I rolled the bin over there and started throwing the stuff in the yard (did I mention I was pissed?). A few guys ran up and I explained the situation. One of them apologized and said the people weren’t from here and didn’t know they couldn’t do that. I said that maybe they should have been supervised. He said he would empty my bin and get it back to me. I said he would do that right now. The guys got bags and cleaned it out. I still had to sweep the all the dirt out of it. If this guy was using the same people for all his clean-outs, it probably wasn’t the first time that had happened.
One way to think about this is what would you do if the homeowner was watching. Would you throw trash in the can without asking? If not, then it’s probably not okay to throw trash in at other times.
I was referring to throwing the bag in the empty can before I have a chance to bring it home. It’s going to be there for a week. It’s not the end of the world, but I worry when I throw things in there could breakage, etc. I would have much less concern if it was simply sitting on top for a short time before the can was emptied.
There are jerks engaged in just about every activity - including dog owners/walkers - and neighbors. And then there is the issue of how significant a transgression needs to be before you will allow yourself to be bothered. How effectively have you hardened/numbed yourself.
We’ve discussed it before, but I’ll mention the always inconceivable bags of poop left along a path/trail. Maybe some small percentage of such folk INTEND to pick it up, but the majority of such bags I see have been out there for a while. With everything I said about my comfort picking up and disposing of MY god’s poop, I find disgusting the idea of picking up someone else’s bag which has been sitting there for a while.
We took our dogs down to the nearby river for a swim this summer. Two of the dogs defecated, and I picked up and took the bags home with us. I stopped for gas and put the bags in the garbage can by the pump I was using.
My gf thought that was wrong. What is that garbage can there for?
Yeah - there is no sign saying the can is to be used only for refuse generated on site. Would your GF object to - say - using the gas station can to dispose of the wrapper for candy bought elsewhere? Or a used tissue that had been bought elsewhere?
I think “pubic” trash cans (" " to recognize that the gas station is privately owned) are quite different than homeowners’ cans.
