12/27/2023 0 Comments Garbage truck video californiaBut I’m just one guy, darn it, I can’t save them all.ĭoing something decent with your castoffs has never been easier. I paid $20 for one much like them on craigslist last year, and would happily have offered $35 for the pair. It’s like watching a disposable consumption snuff film. I usually enjoy the garbage videos almost as much as my son does, but seeing two perfectly good toy cars-the Flintstonesque foot-powered ones kids ride in-pitched into a formidable McNeilus front-end loader is too much. In one particularly heartbreaking YouTube moment, senseless violence is committed against what appears to be an entire toddler-hood worth of toys. But the ethnographic evidence of YouTube does not lie: Americans still throw out an absurd amount and variety of stuff, most of it either sellable, salvageable, or recyclable. Overall, the daily generation of landfill-destined trash in the US has declined modestly since a 2000 high of nearly 4 ¾ pounds per person. My students go out of their way to build side tables out of old VHS cassettes, and kinetic pelican sculptures out of scavenged bleach bottles and PVC pipe, for gosh sakes. Here in the bubble, recycling and composting are the law for households and businesses alike. Is the home basketball hoop a little banged up? Toss it in! Have a five-piece living room set that clashes with the new drapes? Grind it up! An unwanted toilet? In it goes! But it’s the exotic items that really surprise. Some households astound by sheer volume-8, 10 or 12 black garbage bags per pickup elicit nary a comment nor complaint from the workers. They see everything from traditional rear-loaders, to automated side- and front-loaders, to the exotic knuckle boom trucks, which look like those arcade games where you try to grab a stuffed doll by the head with a set of metal claws.Īnd here’s what else the kids see: that every last manifestation of the American dream of disposable consumption can be hauled to the curb and disappeared into the crushing jaws of a garbage truck by municipal workers in fluorescent green safety vests. ![]() ![]() Home-shot compilations with titles like “ Garbage Trucks Part II” and “ Types of ‘Garbage Truck’” amass millions of views, mostly, presumably, by delighted youngsters. (Not every day, and with full parental participation- c’mon bubble people, a *little* screen time isn’t going to hurt him.) If you don’t have young children, you might not be aware that the garbage truck video is a robust genre. In between garbage days, we sometimes watch garbage truck videos on YouTube. The kid loves everything to do with tossing items into cans, wheeling them to the curb, and best of all, waiting for the awesome machines that come once a week to grab and hydraulically dump! dump! dump! the rolling containers for recyclables, compostables and landfill-destined trash into their hungry mechanical maws. At home, “garbage truck!” was among my son’s first phrases. But still, I was recently reminded that some Americans continue to use incandescent light bulbs, and I was genuinely surprised.Ī far bigger shock came, as they usually do, unbidden from the Internet. ![]() I come from the outside world, so I know my current behavioral baseline is a little skewed. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. Its name is San Francisco, a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative.
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