Spring Cleaning! (trash Pickup)

[JDoors]

I'm tired but feelin' good about it. Went through the garage and got rid of SO MUCH JUNK!

If you don't have it where you live, once a year the trash folk will pick up EVERYTHING you place at the curb, no charge. Usually there are all kinds of limits; size, content, tie this up, bundle that, this goes there, that goes here, etc. Roving bands of recyclers drive around picking through the junk, thank God, because I got rid of three CRT computer monitors (among other obsolete computer junk).

I mean, why do I even have the first lamps I ever owned? Big, hulking Spanish-Inquisition things; gold, black and red, with black and red velvet shades. Yeah, someday I'll ... NEVER!

And not to be a Gladys Kravitz or anything, but some of my neighbors are throwing out more stuff than I own.

[Pete_C]

We have monthly bulk trash pickup. Pretty much anything non hazardous goes.

They had a CRT recycling deal for the last two months where you could drop off all your old monitors and tvs at any city transfer point and a recycling company would pick them up there (normally they tell you not to put out CRT due to lead but they do take them if left out and most places charge you to dispose of them ).

Next week is my week so this weekend I think I will take the power saw and do some spring tree trimming (got some dead limbs and some I need to trim before they start growing and hitting my cable line or roof) .

Here too the scrappers come through on bulk week. They grab anything they can scrap out (get metals they can turn in at recyclers etc) , and the yard salers who will take anything that looks cleanable or repairable and see if they can fix it and sell it in a yard sale.

No complaints there, my experience with trying to sell my crap is that the money you make is not worth the time you have to put in . So if someone else wants to repurpose it then that is a good thing.

[Pete_C]

Still cloudy with a chance of storms today so I decided to defrost the deep freezer.

Pulled everything out and put it in my ice chests.

Turned off the freezer and blocked the door open.

After things had a chance to begin thawing I took the plastic ice tool and removed a full 16 inch deep kitchen sink worth of ice.

Still waiting for the stuff behind the cooling plates to thaw out.

I did not realize how much had built up over the last year (or if I even bothered to do it last year). But in theory my mother in law is going to send a bunch of frozen veggies from the farm when my brother in law comes to visit next month so I figured I need to clear it out and make some room.

I already took all the older cheap steaks out and after letting them half thaw ran them all through the meat grinder to make ground round and ground sirloin ( I normally buy a whole round or sirloin when they have them on for 99 cents a pound and then cut my own steaks and roasts and grind my own beef as needed).

Thawing the last batch of chicken breasts to make fried chicken out of.

Next will be updated inventory as I reload stuff and sort it by date and type.

But it still has a couple hours to thaw.

I found a salmon tail I have no idea when I bought (probably bought the whole salmon and saved the tail just for the cats) so I will probably cook it up for the cats. Same with the ground pork , but that goes to the dogs (probably bought it for meat loaf mix or meat balls or something that needs more fat and flavor than ground round alone provides).

[JDoors]

... normally they tell you not to put out CRT due to lead but they do take them if left out and most places charge you to dispose of them ...

Yeah, there's a short story 'bout that: I wasn't going to put the CRTs out due to that exact reason (and that's also why I wound up with a total of three of them -- too lazy to do it right). But an ancient printer? Sure, why not? I was still haulin' stuff to the curb when one 'junk guy' grabbed the printer and threw it in his truck. I went down and asked him if he took computer monitors. After getting through the lanquage barrier ('like TV?') he said HE didn't take 'em, but others do. Great! Put 'em out and the NEXT TRUCK that came through grabbed 'em. PERFECT.

I'm sure they're recycling rather than repurposing them as he TOSSED 'em into his truck. Even though the monitors are old and I haven't had 'em hooked up in probably a decade, it hurt to seem 'em tossed like that!

I guess I never was home (or awake) when the trash company came through, or they're doing it differently this year, but they had like EIGHT trucks blasting through the neighborhood. Whoa.

Edited April 18, 2009 by JDoors

[Pete_C]

Yeah, here on bulk day they have a big grapple truck and several haul trucks. The grapple truck grabs stuff and tosses into the waiting haul truck and packs it down. When one fills up it takes off to the transfer point and then next in line takes its position. But they are pretty efficient about allocating resources and rarely have less than one or more than two in the queue.

We have an electronics recycler in the area, and they first try to repurpose CRTs , making analog TVs for sale in third world countries or something like that out of them.

The ones that are not repurposeable are sent through a grinder and the various metals reclaimed .

The advances they have made in single stream recycling and sorting a recycling stream are really amazing.