My husband complained to me yesterday that the neighbors outside the cul-de-sac have left their garbage on the road for the truck to pick up. Those neighbors are not part of our village but out of hospitality, our village officials have welcomed them. Now this problem of garbage just goes to show that they don't deserve the hospitality. Maybe they have their reasons to put out the garbage in advance, no time to spare or whatever. But leaving their garbage in the street is out of line. What if the garbage truck did not arrive, their trash will be there on the road overnight? Here is their garbage -
Yikes! No one in their right mind would just put trash on the street here. They would at least have it in a garbage can. Someone needs to have a talk with said neighbors before it happens again. In the middle of the road is not where you put your trash! I nominate you @Corie Henson No seriously, I think you would be good at that, friendly yet firm! Buy them a garbage can if you have to!
Believe it or not, we see broken-open bags of trash, on either the side or right on, a main street close to where we live. We were told that people put the bag of trash on top of their vehicle or on the trunk, forget its there and drive off. If this happens on the weekend, no County or City employees to pick it up. It sure can make an area look trashy when, in reality, it's not.
Everything has to be in a garbage can neatly lined up in front of your house. We get 3 cans per house and they have to be set a few ft apart...think that's so the garbage loader can pick up the individual can. You have one day to take your empty cans back to wherever you keep them...you could be fined otherwise. They all have to be the City of Fresno's cans also. Green is yard waste, blue is recyclables and grey is garbage.
We have the same kind of guidelines/rules here as well, and the city furnishes the trash cans here, too, so that they will all be the same size. It used to be that people had their own trash cans that they set out; but now that the garbage trucks are automated and not the trash picked up by the garbage collector, they want a uniform size of cans. Most people do take their trash cans in after the pickup day, and not put them out again until the early morning of the next trash collection day, because people will steal the trash cans of they are left on by the street. However, we have a lot of people that live on our short street that walk and don't have a vehicle, and those people just throw their trash in people's yard and on the street and everywhere. They will walk down to the little grocery store on the corner, buy some food and soda pop to drink, or maybe beer, and then they wander back home, throwing the wrappers, styrofoam plates and beer cans out as they go. We are always picking up candy wrappers and aluminum cans out of the yard along the road, and I am sure that all of the neighbors up and down the street have to do the same thing. These people DO have their own trash cans, and could easily carry the trash home and dispose of it properly; but they don't do that.
I take what can be recycled to the recycle center in town. I burn everything else that will burn. I leave meat scraps out for the animal, put other food scraps in the compost. There's not usually much left which I only need to take to the landfill once or twice a year.
We have to take our own trash to a transfer station, where it is compressed into cubes and transported to a landfill somewhere. It's actually not a landfill because they are creating a rather attractive mountain of trash just south of Bangor, interestingly right along I-95. Most people wouldn't recognize that it was a trash dump unless they happen to be dumping on the side facing the freeway at the time. As they move to different parts of the pile, the other parts are seeded with vegetation. In the end, they'll have a mountain where there didn't used to be one. When I lived in Orange County, they had one like that near San Bernardino. It was so large that parts of it would grow up into trees before they got around to that section again. People would actually camp there. When I worked for a body and towing company, I would drive their dump truck there once a week, and I had to get a good run at it or I couldn't make it to the top, it was so high. Once someone had stopped in front of me as I was approaching the hill, and I had to wait for an opening to back up enough to get a good start before I could make it up.
We have an ordinance aside from the community regulation as issued by the homeowner's association. It's just that there are people who cannot follow simple rules. Even stray dogs are prohibited but those people in the cul-de-sac are the violators of every rule in the book. And even if they are residing outside our village, we treat them as equal with no hint of discrimination. My husband is like the olden truant officer who would call your attention when he sees you doing something wrong. But he talks with diplomacy and he takes pictures... the camera surely settles the issue smoothly.
There was a time last year when our place was attacked by hordes of flies. It's strange because our place is usually clean except for a few flies. But at that time, there were hordes all around. And then we discovered that in the cul-de-sac of our road, there was a pile of coconut shell in the vacant lot. It looks like that vacant lot (which is just 3 lots away from our property) was being used as depository of trash. And like the garbage of this topic, it was again the undoing of those neighbors living outside our village.