Back to Trash

Been awhile. You KNOW the Q hates trash as much as you. Each morning and evening I pick up a dozen pieces of litter from my house to the corner. A lot of times it's stuff that's blown all the way from the corner bin, which is usually overflowing with household garbage and pieces of crap that people "lay" on top. Sure there are litterers, but after 11 years of watching this play out I can see now that the litterers are basically just tossing things down on an already filthy street. They do it way less on a spotless surface. So like Sisyphus, I continue to roll that boulder up the hill...a piece here, a piece there...

Last night I called a meeting at CB9 to talk trash. (I chair the Environmental Protection Committee). The heads of the Kingston, Nostrand and Flatbush Merchants Associations were there (Sholom Goldstein, Lindiwe Kamau, and Desmond Romeo/Shelley Kramer respectively). They were extremely helpful in identifying the real problems, and after enough study and frustration I'm inclined to agree. It's household trash - dumping - that causes most of the debris. Why do people bring their personal garbage to the corners and tree pits in shoddy bags that bust open and create a daily trashcastrophe? I tells you why. Landlords are not making it easy for tenants to do the right thing. If you don't give your tenants somewhere to put their trash when it accumulates, they're gonna put it wherever they can, because they don't want to keep it in their house (except the hoarders). Many times there is simply no trash system; no barrel alongside the building, no backyard holding pen, no basement access, to hold the garbage til trash day. And then, some Supers let it pile up, if there's a Super at all.

For those too new to remember, twas a time in our fair city when most every merchant had a crappy looking dump ster outside their business. The City did away with those eye and nose sores, wisely I might add, but the trade-off was that people had no place to (illegally) dump their trash anymore. Come to think of it the Q used to do that too! Naughty, naughty young selfish Q. For shame. But I cop to it to tell you that HAD there been an easy, better alternative I would have done it. I was living on Vanderbilt Avenue at the time, right near the corner of Prospect. The neighbor was pretty dismal back then, but it was rarely filthy the way Flatbush is today. And that, my friends, was because there was always somewhere to dump your rubbish.

In many modern cities of Europe they have a crafty solution (don't they always?). Everyone takes their garbage to bright, cheery communal bins just down the block or around the corner. Yes, it's not the European City's job to come directly to your house and do the dirty work. YOU have to do it, then they simply come by and empty the big containers. Even when they get all graffiti covered and wheat pasted they're still built with this primary directive in mind - "Keepen Zie  Müll off the Straße, Günther!"


So what decideth the Brain Trust last night was actually in the realm of possibility? Well, other nabes have gotten their councilmember to allocate money for these kinds of corner bins:

They cost about $500 each, and it's much harder to dump in them cuz of the small hole at the top. AND the trash can't fly around as much, what with that roof on the rubbish. (Tear the Roof Off the Rubbish, Tear the Roof Off the Rubish, Tear the Roof Off the Rubbish - G. Clinton)

Some neighborhoods have the solar powered Big Belly bins that cost a few thousand bucks:

But let's get reasonable here. That ain't gonna happen on the struggling-to-get-organized stretch of Flatbush from Empire to Parkside.Thank you Pratt Area Comunity Council for helping to get the merchant's act together, but in the meantime here's the plan:

• Go to our council people to get new bins out of the budget
• Bring the Sanitation Manager for District 9, Mr. Williams, to a meeting to discuss how to ticket the scofflaws
• Put more emphasis on the household garbage and stop harassing merchants who are doing the right thing
• Identify worst offenders and find out who the landlords are and bring some garbage to their houses and dump it on their living room couch