The truth is I do indeed take sanitation workers for granted. Until now I’ve only thought of them during holiday season, when I tape a tip-filled envelope to the garbage can lid, praying for its safe delivery to the right person and not some diaper-crammed landfill. But sanitation workers provide a service that we rely on throughout the year. Imagine what New Jersey would be like if there was a sanitation strike. All the Garden State stereotypes we put up with would suddenly come true!
Our local sanitation workers are an honorable and friendly bunch. They don’t complain about the bags that get mauled overnight by local animals when I forget to seal the lids. The recycling crew, as well, never seems to care about my poorly-stacked newspapers, the size of my weakly-crushed cardboard, my color-blindness when it comes to separating glass bottles, or my family’s insatiable appetite for diet soda. And the garden scrap picker-uppers dutifully relocate my weeds, dirt, and the 200-or-so earthworms that formally fertilized my backyard. So long fellas, and thanks very mulch.
The neighborhood flea market also known as “bulk pickup” is nothing short of miraculous. Not since Santa Claus delivered ten-speeds via chimney has an entity managed to make matter disappear overnight contrary to the laws of time and space. Of course, the roaming human scavengers help. Last year, I put out an entire disassembled crib, minus one key piece. I didn’t do it with the intention to annoy anyone, but sure enough one woman spent half an hour – between 11:30 and midnight by my recollection – trying to put the thing together by flashlight on my lawn. She needed to know if it was worth making space on her flatbed between a three-legged end table and a 1982 Atari game system.
Wanting insight, and perhaps absolution, from someone who really knows how to talk trash, I spoke to Dave Tooley, Vice President of Government and Regulatory Affairs for Waste Management, which runs our sanitation services and is also the country’s top recycler. He acknowledged widespread misimpressions and stereotypes of sanitation workers, partially thanks to “The Sopranos,” but points out that the job of picking up garbage has become a very sophisticated and, in many ways, high-tech environmental business. “We just do our job, but operate more like a world class company than…bada-bing,” he said.
I asked Dave what “garbage men” would like to be called in the modern era of political correctness. He said they probably deserve the title “environmentalists,” but “as long as the customers are happy, they can all us whatever they like.” My suggestion: ask for and use their first names. I learned this tip when the man next door asked me to stop saying “Hey, Neighbor Guy!”
It may surprise you to know that Waste Management also sponsors NASCAR drivers and cars in several races, including the Daytona 500 and the much lesser-known Detritus 250. Needless to say, you’re not going to find a bunch of empty McDonald’s cups and Dunkin Donut bags in the back of these cars like you would in mine.
This company is apparently the Microsoft of the waste management world, but it works for me, and it’s one bill I’m glad to pay each month.
Perhaps the most famously-grouchy garbage aficionado of all time said it best when he told Slimy, his worm friend, “Close your eyes and dream of all the wonderful trash that's yet to come.”
To which I’ll add: And the decent people who graciously pick it up.
HOME