Separating the trash from the garbage not easy

Growing up in the Chicago suburbs, “taking out the garbage” was one of my earliest and least-liked responsibilities.

Not a pretty job certainly, but along with mowing the grass and shoveling snow, it kept me out of dutch with my parents.

Nobody had plastic bags with fancy draw strings back then. You just double-bagged those old brown paper grocery sacks and hoped for the best. Getting it from the corner of the kitchen to the trash cans next to the garage without the bag disintegrating was often a nifty trick.

More than once I remember juggling a gooey mess of coffee grounds and chicken bones leaking through the bag before depositing the whole mess in a garbage can with a metal lid that might substitute for an Edsel hubcap. In my mind I was Gale Sayers dashing through the Green Bay secondary toward the goal line.

Thinking about it now, I don’t know whether it’s a generational thing or a geographic thing, but in Chicago, we had garbage, garbage cans and the garbage truck.

Here in Indiana, it‘s trash, trash and more trash. And we’ve been talking trash a lot lately. Especially the recycling aspect of it. We must have had half-a-dozen stories about recycling and trash collection over the past few weeks.

The mayor has even been forced into making a weekly press release about how we’re doing on our trash. In the latest report, only two toters were taken by Republic for violating local recycling rules. That’s pretty good since the first time Republic toted the toters away, it was 144.

All the publicity and talk about recycling and trash has given me pause a number of times recently. Once I had a gooey can left over from eating canned spaghetti (which I don’t recommend to anyone with any taste buds). I must have wasted 10 gallons of water trying to get all the remnants of spaghetti and the indescribable sauce out of the can before finally deciding to just toss the whole mess in the garbage, ‘er trash.

Breaking down cardboard boxes also seems to be another recycling issue. Now that’s something that comes second nature to me. At my first job at the local deli, I was quickly shown the art of breaking down boxes to minimize the volume of trash in the dumpster, and I still conform to that today. It doesn’t matter the size or shape, untouched boxes use up unnecessary space in my trash can and the landfill.

I remember even breaking down cigarette cartons after filling the rack behind the deli register. (That reminds me of an interesting sidebar: An elderly man of Mideastern descent, who apparently knew little English, came in regularly for cigarettes, but instead of asking for Camels, he always grunted, “Humps.” Had to wonder: Did that make Joe Camel Joe Humps in his world?).

After living out in the country for a quarter-century -- where we had a trash barrel as well -- I’m probably a little jaded about the recycling situation. We threw it all away then because the only way to recycle cans and bottles was to pay our waste hauler extra to have it done. I was not about to do that.

So in reviewing what can and cannot be recycled now, cardboard pizza boxes jumped out at me as forbidden fruit. I always thought those were recyclable. If memory serves, one of the chains, Domino’s perhaps, used to feature the recycling logo on the box.

Happened to be a city meeting when the topic came up, and I said I think I have a pizza box or two in my recycling toter, which was already at the curb in front of my house.

“Uh-oh, busted,” the mayor responded.

When I finally got off work about midnight, the first thing I did was stop the car in the street and dump the recycling toter onto its side. Dumpster diving in the dark, I poked around and latched onto one pizza box and then another, pulling them out of the recycling bin and tossing them into my trash.

Satisfied that I’d saved the city’s recycling load, I looked down to see that I’d ground mud into the knees of my pants and apparently gotten pizza sauce and some unidentifiable grease on my jacket.

But hey, I didn’t want the recycling police on my case. And who knows, maybe I can recycle those pants.