In the opening scenes of the 1989 film Sex, Lies, and Videotape, Andie MacDowell lies on her therapist’s couch and talks about her obsession with garbage. “I’ve gotten real concerned over what’s going to happen with all the garbage,” she says. “We’ve got so much of it, you know, we have to run out of places to put this stuff eventually.”
She then describes her most terrifying vision: a garbage bin that keeps producing its own garbage and overflowing.
Bin there, done that … finding one with space for incoming rubbish can be a challenge. Credit:Louise Kennerley
I also think a lot about garbage. It could be traced back to that one time in the distant past when the bins didn’t get put out. Ever since that fateful night, I have woken up in a cold sweat when I hear the hum of the trucks coming at dawn: Is the bin out?!
The Christmas/new year period is especially challenging for garbophobes and, in our household, we hit critical mass. MacDowell’s horror vision of a self-actualising garbage bin became my reality. Christmas wrapping, consumer packaging, food scraps, house guests, young adults and Uber Eats: all of this created the perfect garbage storm.
Bin night was Thursday and by the Sunday night prior, we were at pussy’s bow in the red bin and fast approaching the same situation in the yellow. I began to strategise obsessively about garbage. Outsourcing any excess was all I could think about.
I cruised around the local area looking for public bins with large enough receiving mouths for small, harmless bags of overflow garbage. I’m not proud of it and I’m aware that it’s illegal. But desperate times call for desperate measures.
My stealthy reconnaissance work paid off. One morning, in a magical “angels singing from heavens” moment, I found the Holy Grail: a bin in the local park that had been ripped from its lid-limiting mooring (the mechanism that prevents you from opening the lid wide enough to place a bag of garbage into it). Not only was it poised to receive, it had empty space for the filling.
When I first discovered it, there was space aplenty. But by the next day, others had gotten wind of this magical receptacle and it was popping its lid, full to bursting with other illegal dumpers’ garbage.
I continued my garbage quest around the locality and identified two more receivers. To mitigate my guilt about illegal dumping, I divided my garbage into small, mainly non-putrid refuse and spread it equally between my three target receptacles.
Bin there, done that: confessions of a festive empty-bin hunter
Source: Philippines Alive
