On July 1, workers in the city of Philadelphia walked off the job for better pay and benefits, as occasionally happens with unions. This included “911 dispatchers, trash collectors, water department workers and many others.” That strike ended last week, but not before eight days of trash piled up in the streets. Just watch this to see how much trash accumulated in that time:
It was so bad that people stopped to take photos, lol. In other videos, residents complained about how bad the stench was. People complained about rats and rodents being in the trash not long after the trash started to pile up. Can you blame them (the people or the rats)?
This might be reason 1001 to never live in a major city. But I’m preaching to the choir here. The problem is that, unlike nearly every other post on my blog, I don’t actually have a solution to the problem this time.
If this were only your trash, then you could do some things to mitigate these concerns, at least for a while. For instance, you could start with composting. My guess is that you, like us, aren’t composting as much as you could. We tend to only compost fruit and vegetable kitchen scraps, but there’s a lot more that we would start to compost if worse came to worst.
Still, I realize that’s not something everyone wants to do, so burying trash might be the next best option. Of course, you’d want to pull out items that are better recycled, like tin and glass, but even this isn’t ideal because it requires you to dig large holes and be rather proactive with your trash on a daily basis. And if you don’t have the space outdoors or it’s the dead of winter, then this just isn’t an option.
If nothing else, double- or triple-bag trash until services resume. This is yet one more reason why stockpiling items you typically use is wise. And if you can keep the trash stashed somewhere that rodents, wildlife, and pets can’t get into it, then that would be best. This, unfortunately, may require you to temporarily partition parts of a garage, shed, or an area (away from your living space) even if exposed outdoors for trash accumulation. The goal, of course, is to keep trash as far away from your living areas, food, water, and survival supplies as is plausible because it’s not just the rodents and wildlife getting into it, but the decomposing materials that make trash unsanitary and generally unpleasant to be around.
But what about the trash and recycling you’ve already accumulated when you discovered it wasn’t going to be picked up? You basically have two choices: either you can dig through it (wear gloves!) and sort things out to reduce what is truly trash, or you can leave it be and better contain it all in additional trash bags or garbage cans so that the aforementioned problems are delayed. Honestly, I’d probably just better contain the trash than dig through it, but that’s just me.
With respect to the Philadelphia trash strike, however, the real problem is everyone else’s trash. If this were a traditional suburban neighborhood, then you could be proactive and teach or help others how to deal with their trash, assuming you’re the neighborly type. Unfortunately, there’s always going to be “that guy” who refuses to do anything, so there’s not much you can about that problem. Still, it can’t hurt to be proactive and talk to your neighbors.
Now, what if, heaven-forbid, you live in a major city when this happens? Again, I don’t have a great answer for you. At minimum, you can deal with your own trash. Maybe you could encourage your neighbors to do the same. Eventually, you’ll probably do what everyone else is doing: take the trash somewhere else and hope it goes away. But if everyone else is doing the same thing, odds are that somebody will be taking their trash to your area, which only exacerbates the problem.
An aside: Wouldn’t it be somehow hilarious if people living in the cities never ended up fighting over the last scraps of food or water during a SHTF event … but fighting over who left what piles of trash in front of their apartment complex? 😉 I guess I shouldn’t poke fun because it would become a real problem. Still, it would be an interesting turn of events.
Anyway, I don’t have an answer this time. I think you just get to live with it until the problem gets sorted … aside from moving, that is.
Leave a Reply