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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Green waste cans causing the blues
ONE of life's great paradoxes is that it's almost impossible to successfully throw away a rubbish can. Like a boomerang, a discarded rubbish can always returns home.
The curiously colored (blue) "green waste" rubbish cans that the city kindly inflicted on most of the population sit in front of many homes like lonely memorials to bad planning. Why the Outdoor Circle, self-appointed guardian of our view planes, hasn't demanded the city remove these pointless eyesores from our sore eyes is beyond me. It's bad enough that so many people leave the regular old ugly black rubbish cans by the streets in perpetuity, but now they are kept company by their blue cousins. (Why are "green waste" rubbish cans not green, one wonders.)
I could go into the history of how the city paid for the stupid blue bins before having an actual green waste pickup program in place, but it would just make you crazy. For two years, residents have been stuck as stewards of the unemployed receptacles. (Notice, I don't say "we" have been stuck with the blue cans, because I live on one of those streets where automated trash can picker-upper trucks can't work. Our rubbish is picked up the old-fashioned way, by human beings.)
I ONCE suggested residents charge the city a storage fee until a green-waste service is actually provided. Charging only a dollar a week, residents would have earned enough to gas up their cars almost twice.
Some people want to throw the blue cans away, but, as previously pointed out, that's almost impossible. A neighbor put the blue bin into the black bin in a tricky but misguided attempt to get rid of the extra can, only to find it standing next to its brother-in-alms when the trash truck pulled away.
During a recent trip to the rubbish transfer station, I noticed a number of blue bins had been abandoned there by frustrated homeowners. But even at a garbage dump it's impossible to get rid of garbage cans. The several blue bins stood together off to the side of a Dumpster, patiently waiting to be called to duty. Apparently, the transfer station workers couldn't find it within themselves to chuck them into the pit for a trip to the HPOWER plant.
Had the blue bins made it to HPOWER, they mostly likely would have been pulled off the conveyor belt of death before being fed to the flames. Recycling is great. But turning a perfectly good trash can into electricity just seems wrong.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com