Perhaps the most shocking realization from my entry into adulthood was that trash collection isn’t free. Since that moment, an inordinate amount of my life has been spent thinking about and handling trash.

I’ve lived three different trash-collecting lifestyles, each with a drastically different day-to-day flow. I’ve reveled in the spaciousness of seemingly bottomless dumpsters, taken on the dump-run burden, and done the curbside shuffle. Each has a unique balance of pros and cons.

By far the worst system was taking my own trash to the dump, which coincided with my senior year of college when I lived off-campus with five other guys.

My pickup truck allowed us a certain liberty during the frozen winter months that didn’t translate well to springtime thaws. The only word that comes to mind is squalor.

The town dump required a residential permit. They’d weigh you coming in, then weigh you going out, and charge you a per-pound difference. We schemed to ride in with a buddy riding shotgun who’d sneak away between weighings so I could insist they owed us money, but dump men have eagle eyes and shockingly bad senses of humor so it never actually worked.

Curbside pickup is great, but it requires a certain amount of planning. Municipal curbside garbage collectors tend to be far more selective than private services because they lack the financial incentive to be lenient with the rules. The municipal workers in Norwalk, Connecticut would systematically reject trash that didn’t meet their exacting standards.

I feared angering the Norwalk trash man, who had a wicked sense of humor. After we moved into a rented house, our landlord discovered that the bottom of his trash can had rotted out. He left it at the curb with an attached cardboard sign reading, “TRASH.” They took the sign but left the broken trash can.

Curbside pickup also has a security component to it. Unattended trash bins more than twelve hours outside of trash-collection time are open advertisements to burglars or overly meddling neighbors.

I have two upcoming trips scheduled with one night at home in between. I got too excited when I realized that the in-between night was also my garbage night. It made my day. Nobody wants to leave trash spoiling for well over a week – especially in the summer.

Yet it can be off-putting to ask someone to manage your trash when away. Without the anonymity of a dumpster, curbside bins catalog your refuse as belonging to your house. And people love to peek.

I felt extremely violated when a former neighbor’s creepy father brought in my trash cans without being asked. Had I been out of town, I would’ve appreciated the gesture as a courtesy, but instead I came home from a normal day at work to find my cans missing from the end of the drive. The feeling of violation was amplified when he happily informed me that he had also washed them out with a hose.

The worst though, are the pickers, unabashedly digging through our bins as if they were a public resource. The most aggressive pickers come with dumpsters, like the ones at the massive apartment complexes I used to live at in Austin, Texas.

These pickers arrived in non-headlight-using pickup trucks and would creep by every night looking for chipped coffee tables and discarded mattresses to sell on Craigslist.

Dumpsters are like mini ecosystems. I watched one for over two years with great interest because of a cute little raccoon who visited the dumpster near the first apartment I moved into with Jenny. He was hard to find, but if you swung your headlights right, you’d catch him scurrying away without a fuss. We named him Rocky and would strain to find him when coming home late at night.

One day, Rocky had a friend we named Roxanne, and we shared in his delight at no longer being alone. Not long after, three or four little ones appeared alongside them. It was adorable when we’d see them on hind legs, reaching for the dumpster’s ledge with all their might.

But then things started changing. Whereas Rocky had merely adopted it, his offspring were born into the darkness and didn’t share the natural fright of things like people, cars, and headlights. Their unabashed gluttony and obvious love for incest created a reign of terror that swept through the apartment complex.

By the time we moved out, I wouldn’t even take the trash out at night. We almost lost Jenny once on a trip to the mailbox too close to dusk when she spooked a raccoon who jumped straight out of a trash can at face-level in her direction.

We moved out shortly thereafter. Trash collection isn’t free, but Jenny’s life is a price we weren’t willing to pay.

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