"Why don't you just go out and pick it up?" someone asked. The problem of trash in our neighborhood becomes discouraging and as I said in my first post on this, there is a strong tendency to just give up.
There is often loose trash in the alley and we get used to seeing it there. There is a constant stream of people who go through the garbage to take anything useful. What is left gets strewn about. When one of my neighbors did neatly bag the items shown in my first post, the bags were ripped open and the trash strewn about again. We also have a problem with "fly dumping". When someone has a lot of garbage, rather than putting it behind their own homes, they put it in someone else's alley. That way they are not responsible for the fines. In this case the sanitation workers didn't take the garbage even after it was bagged, saying they needed help loading it into the truck. Eventually, after nearly a month, that garbage has been removed, but there is a similar pile of loose garbage a few houses down from us.
In order to "just go out and pick it up" we have to supply the bags, put the garbage in the bags, watch over the bags until the garbage truck comes, and then go out and help them load it into the truck. That's what eventually happened, but it's a lot of work, so we tend to look at it for weeks. It's a lot easier to blog about it.
OK,I'm going to go out and bag up some garbage now.
2 comments:
:) I like your thought line. I totally understand where you are coming from. I have the same problems/situation...we formed a coalition of neighbors to do block cleanups every other Saturday (including a quick run through of the alleys). It has been a miracle how clean the streets AND alleys have been since we started this.
Not to mention it has given us face time with neighbors in an event we are both really good at...picking up garbage.
I highly recommend block cleanups with neighbors. Thanks for the response.
Wonderer
That's a great idea. We should do it here. I did go out and bag up the neighbor's pile of garbage. Thanks for inspiring me to do so! It felt good.
Post a Comment