City launches East Boston trash crackdown

A colleague lived in East Boston. She said her neighbors on trash day would simply toss the bags over the railing of their third floor apartment, and let the chips (so to speak) fall where they may.

Boston provides residents with the large 64-gallon blue recycling carts for combined paper/plastic/glass streaming already. Residents in larger buildings can use the smaller bins. Residents of most neighborhoods including East Boston can put recycling out in clear plastic bags too. The food waste is a good point and coming soon looks like. Residents can currently purchase composting bins on the cheap from the city as well.

We have recycling bins as previously noted. What we don't have - and from your description Medford doesn't either - is trash bins handed out. We need to buy them ourselves or put our bags out the morning of.

I'm lucky in that I have that scourge that some here don't like: a dog. So when I take her out in the mornings, on trash day(s) I bring ours out with me. Easy, it doesn't sit out all night for critters or human scavengers (typically looking for recyclables they mistakenly think are in our trash) and I don't have to drag bins from back to front. But this works for us because it's just two of us and we don't generate much garbage. We do generate a lot of recycling and for that we happily make use of our big blue bins. :)

I imagine it's more difficult in larger households - family or those made up of many roommates. But I still think it's easily addressed when adults act like adults and take care of their sh*t.

I too live in Medford and we get two big green bins. One is for the weekly trash collection and the other is for combined recycling which gets picked up every other week. It works fine but I wish they picked up recycling weekly as well.

Yes, having residents sort their garbage into 3 bins will definitely solve the problem.

No trash bag will ever be hefty enough to fend off rats, possums, or raccoons. I see this in other neighborhoods as well. All free-standing homes should be required by law to have secured trash cans and all buildings with multiple units required to have secured dumpsters; off street ones behind the building at that. And if there is not enough room for such or the truck that collects it the building should be knocked down and built anew to accommodate such. Sick of trash strewn along like we are living in Bhopal.

I've bought dollar store trash bags and they have worked just fine. If they can make it down 2 flights of stairs when I bring them out, they can make it 3 feet from the curb to the truck.

And in the specific incident I mentioned, they were picking up the cans/barrels and dumping them directly into the truck. Whatever didn't make it in, didn't make it in. I'll give you that there were probably loose items in them and the residents were definitely at fault for that, but at the same time, as a trash collector you have 1 job, and it's not like the clearance to dump a barrel into a garbage truck is that small.