Published: April 29, 2008 10:28 pm            

STEPHANIE SALTER: One item you should put in your trash bin for a while: Empathy

TERRE HAUTE — This is a plea for mercy for your trash collectors.

There are about 45 of them who work for Republic Services and who serve the Terre Haute metro area, picking up our garbage, trash and yard waste, every day.

In case you haven’t noticed, a lot of these guys are getting the snot beaten out of them during the transition from old, hand-feed trash trucks to automated trucks with hydraulic arms that lift and dump the city’s new 96-gallon totes.

Not one of these folks has complained to me. I’ve just watched what many of them are forced to go through to do their job — and it reminds me of the sort of things that are prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

In a few months, all the glitches will be worked out of Terre Haute’s transformative trash collection/recycling system. Republic will get all the new trucks that have been on back order but held up by a variety of circumstances, including added emissions requirements (a good thing). Then, this city will be a nicer, cleaner place to live.

In several pockets of town, it already is. Right now, though, the guys who ride the trucks and wrestle with the dark blue rolling bins on about half the routes are getting the worst of it.

Most of us have never tried to pick up and heave the contents of a loaded trash barrel into the back of a compactor truck. It’s a hard, tough job that — personally speaking — I don’t think anybody gets paid enough to do. Until all the new trucks are in operation, the job will stay twice as hard because the rolling totes are bigger and heavier than most of our old trash containers.

The problem: Hauteans are filling the new totes to, and over, the lidded brim with everything from cabbage leaves to bricks. (Really.) While bricks are never a good idea for any trash bin, at least they won’t crack the spine of an automated hydraulic arm. Not so a human being.

My neighborhood is in one of the sections of town still served by the old trucks. I have seen trash collectors standing on their head inside the new totes, trying to pull out bags and loose garbage that have gotten stuck. I’ve watched them literally stagger under the weight of overloaded bins that barely can be rolled, let alone lifted and dumped.

In this yard clean-up season, I’ve winced as these guys try to contend with a block full of individual homeowners who’ve each set out dozens of bulging bags of grass, sticks and other trimmings to be taken away with the weekly trash haul.

And, yes, I’ve seen some guys give up and leave a third of the contents of a rolling bin in the bottom. If those contents contain rotting garbage, the results are more than an inconvenience and usually mean a call to Republic for a repeat pickup.

Fellow citizens: How about a little common sense and consideration, OK?

The trash and recycling program is still a work in progress. For example, the response to curbside recycling has been so huge, hundreds of people are still waiting for their bins — also on back order. Special Tuesday and Thursday cleanups of chronic, trash-strewn areas are producing major, visible results in several areas of town.

In a couple weeks, I’ll provide a more detailed round-up of the good, the not-so-good and the improving aspects of the trash-recycling scene. But for the next few months, until all the moving parts are in place, here are a few suggestions to make the transition smoother for our trash collectors and, ultimately, ourselves.

1. Don’t overload. Just because you can cram the kitchen sink into a 96-gallon bin, doesn’t mean you should. Terre Haute still offers free pick up of large, heavy items. Call the Board of Public Works (244-2258) to arrange a pickup date.

2. Bag it. If your route is served by the old trucks, make your trash easier to pull out of the rolling bins by confining all of it in securely closed bags. (If you don’t know whether your route has new or old trucks, err on the side of caution.) The environmentally conscious among us can use “green” plastic bags made of recycled materials or large paper bags that are folded.

Just load the bin with this image in mind: A person who is hurrying to unload it by hand.

3. Mitigate the pain. If your weekend yard work fills 10 or 15 large garbage bags with refuse, spread the extra load out over a few pickups. It won’t kill any of us to work our way through a stack of bags until early summer. A green alternative to non-biodegradable plastic is 30-gallon paper yard bags, available at most home, garden and building stores.

4. Empathize. They taught us the Golden Rule in grade school, but we tend to forget. Treat your trash collectors the way you would like to be treated if you had their job. Every time you start to put something in your big bin or you drag a bunch of bags to the curb or alley, stop and remind yourself that a living, breathing, aching human being will have to deal with it.

If you have the opportunity, take a look at the faces of the people who dispose of all you throw away. Better yet, go out and introduce yourself and tell them you appreciate what they do. We’re all in this together.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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