Town of Ashland trash talkin'

Well, we now have to pay a lot of money to get rid of our trash. Last year the town started charging us a fee per year for trash pickup. Okay, property taxes aren't paying for it anymore... we can deal. Now they are rolling in a new "You Throw Away You Pay" campaign where you have to buy official Town of Ashland trash bags, and they'll ONLY pick those up, along with paying the flat yearly fee.

Pretty handsome, eh? Here's the prices of the bags:
- 14-gallon bags: $3.75 for five bags
- 33-gallon bags: $6.50 for five bags.

Bucka-wha?? Are you shitting me?? Seventy-five cents per bag for the small ones or a buck thirty per bag for the 33-gallon bags! Plus whatever we pay for the yearly trash fee, which I don't even pay attention to because it kind of makes me angry. I pay, I just don't pay attention.

What makes it worse is that we just bought a 90-bag box of trash bags.

I think we used about 5 so far. So we have 85 big black trash bags. Anyone interested? They should have a trash-bag buyback program like they do in Boston for guns. For every 100 trash bags you get a $50 gift certificate to Target. But don't use it on trash bags.

When I went to buy the brightly-hued bags yesterday, the kid at CVS was getting all pissed. He's like, "These are so ridiculously overpriced! We don't get anything for even selling these things! And now we can't even sell regular trash bags!" I was like, "Dude, I know!"

So last night as I prepared dinner, I would walk to throw something out, I saw the bright orange glaring at me, and I thought, Crap, if I throw this away, that's like throwing away .04 cents. So I put all the veggie scraps in a plastic bag, started using a dish towel instead of paper towels for drying off veggies and stuff, and started searching random packaging for the recycling symbol. I think I spent 4 minutes searching on an empty bag of burrito tortillas for a recycling symbol. I didn't find one. They'll now pick up recycling once a week instead of biweekly. And man, we were never good at staying on top of recycling, but now we have to really try hard.

You know, it's weird, we spend money pretty liberally when we go grocery shopping or when we go out to eat, so it's weird that I'm so anal about scrimping and saving money on trash pickup! It comes down to very little money in the long run, but I guess it really is working because I can't stop thinking about how to start composting and how we'll keep on top of recycling everything! So good job, Ashland, for making me obsessed! High five!