Here's how it works: precisely at 5:00 pm (well, within a few minutes, anyway) every day (Sat. and Sun. included) the trash bell rings (one of those old-fashion bell-and-clapper bells), and everyone in our alley bustles out carrying the day's garbage.
The bell is rung by one member of the two-person (men and women do this job) sanitation teams that roam the streets at all hours of the day and night. Clad in khaki work clothes, heavy gloves, surgical masks, and fluorescent lime safety vests, they push a three-wheel metal bin about four-feet deep around the maze of alleys until it's filled, then push it back to the main street for collection by a large garbage truck late that night. The bins have clearly been recognized as inadequate for the amount of trash produced, so they have been modified with jerry-rigged wooden extensions that increase the depth to about 7 feet.
Everyone lines up (about 15-20 from our alley) to hand their two or three plastic bags of garbage to the sanitation worker who perches atop the contraption and packs as much as possible into it. Once everyone has brought out their trash, the team moves to the next alley, and one of them again walks up and down ringing the bell to summon the inhabitants and their trash.
It works.
P.
2 comments:
Everyday - man that sounds like alot of trash to go into a landfill somewhere.
Same total amount as if you collect a larger can once a week. And in this climate, the smell would become unbearable if the garbage wasn't removed immediately. As it is, we see the bodies of dead rats frequently in the street and there are many large cockroaches lurking in the nooks and crannies of our kitchen. I hate to think what the vermin situation would be if the trash sat around for a few days.
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