Garbology

As the new week approached, it seemed our whole neighborhood was suddenly put atwitter (not to be confused with Twitter, which is something completely different and perhaps generational):

It was the approach of the City of Lexington's recently revamped recycle and collection schedule.

Nobody, it seemed, was exactly sure when their trash would be picked up.

In the Park Place Historic Neighborhood, where I live, trash was picked up on Fridays, with the recyclables collected every other Friday. Seemingly simple enough, espcially after years abiding by this schedule.

But a month or so ago, we got a mailing notifying us that the collection schedule was changing on April 13. Included was a color-coded calendar with dates featuring green spaces, blue spaces or red spaces, with no explanation of what the colors meant for those specific dates.

The notification also included a Web site that directed a resident to an interactive map to find our particular trash collection day. That's great for people with access to a computer. Part of the trouble is that not everybody has computers.

Anyway, as the new collection week approached, our neighborhood Web site lit up like a Christmas tree. I may have been responsible as the original author of a post asking if anybody in our collection district understood what was happening. About 15 people responded, and none of them had a real clue.

Some of us thought collection day was Thursday, others thought it was Friday. The Find-My-Trash-Collection-Date Web site told each of us to enter our address to find our personal collection day.

It turns out that, for our neighborhood at least, nothing had changed. Trash collection was still on Friday, with recyclables every other Friday.

But in order for the schedule to get off to the correct start, our recyclables were going to be collected for a second straight week to set the correct stagger in motion from the previous schedule. So there. Easy peasy.

I figured there had to be at least 32 college degrees (I might be exaggerating), including a sprinkle of graduate diplomas, among us trying to figure out the neighborhood schedule in our Web site conversation.

Some of the confusion, I think, was the color coded calendar. Some people were equating the blue dates with their blue recyclable containers and the green dates with their green trash containers. The color coding actually correlated with the collection district you live in on a city map. We live in a green district.

The dates colored in red are holidays, when only garbage and recycling rollouts are collected.

The city was doing all this to make its collection more efficient, and I guess maybe it is. Just don't ask our neighborhood to look into it.