Have you noticed that trash collection has become less efficient since the pandemic began? If so, be patient. It’s convenient to blame COVID-19 for all kinds of troubles, and if you stop to think about it, it has heavy impact on trash collection services. And there are ways all of us can help out.

Where does all the trash come from?

Screen shot from a video

Trash haulers collect both from households and commercial accounts. Commercial trash comes from offices, factories, stores, schools, etc. Most people probably think little about it.

Commercial trash has important advantages for trash haulers, recycling centers, and landfills. For one thing each dumpster  holds as much trash as dozens of household containers. Haulers have fewer places to stop and less need to get out of the truck.

What’s more, commercial trash tends to be cleaner. Except for trash from restaurants, it has much less food waste  than household trash.

For years, haulers became used to a certain division between commercial and household trash. Now, people who used to work in offices work from  home. I could multiply examples, but they would all contribute to a great decrease in commercial trash and increase in household trash.

In addition, fewer people shop in stores these days. They buy online instead. Online shopping has various environmental advantages and disadvantages. It clearly adds to the total of household trash. These changes have forced trash collection services to make adjustments.

How does household trash get taken away?

Image by Michael Gaida. from Pixabay

On your trash collection day, you take your trash and recycling to the curb. A truck comes to pick it up and empty your containers.

Let’s not forget that someone is driving that truck and probably has at least one partner. Someone maintains the truck at the garage and makes it ready for each day’s work. Plenty of other people work at landfills and recycling centers.

So let’s revise the description a little. You take stuff to the curb and people come by in a truck to pick it up. They have lives and face the same stressors as anyone else.

During the pandemic, trash haulers must exercise the same social distancing and other precautions as you or the people you regularly see every day do. That imposes the same inefficiencies and delays on their work.

If one sanitation worker gets sick, management has to send someone else out to do the work. But if that one worker gets COVID-19, as many as half a dozen people have to stay home to quarantine. After a while, the city or company that hauls your trash faces a personnel shortage, but no reduction in the amount of necessary work. If your home is late on an affected route, the truck will come by later than usual. Maybe even not until the next day.

How can we help more efficient trash collection?

Tipping floor, where trash truck empty. Source unknown

• As long as we’re on the subject of delays, don’t call to complain. It just takes staff time away from the business of trash collection.
• When you shop online, order several items at once. Fewer deliveries means fewer boxes and less packaging for you to haul out to the curb.
• When you get takeout food and you’re going home to eat it, ask not to receive napkins and utensils. If you forget to ask, then take that stuff out of your bag and give it back. I gave back a straw once (when I wasn’t taking food out) and the young lady put it in the trash instead of putting it back with the other straws. Stupid, but at least it contributed to the commercial trash side.
• Get ingredients from the grocery and cook your own meals. It can be fun and generates much less trash than either takeout or delivery.
• Don’t put loose trash in the container you take to the curb. If it’s in a bag, it’s less likely fall out on the street, where the people in the truck will see it as a health hazard.
• The pandemic has had a particularly harmful effect on recycling. So be extra careful to sort your recycling from regular trash correctly. That greasy pizza box or plastic miscellany causes problems at the recycling center. Among other things it has to haul it to the landfill and pay a tipping fee.