But wait, the Sin City congregation is crying. Hold your horses. That´s sacrilege. Such a cutback would cause too much stink, the residents say. This is, after all, the desert. Remember?

And so back to the drawing board they´ll go.

Ahem.

(Uh-oh. He´s clearing his throat. Rant time.)

Now, we all know that garbage has that lovely stomach-turning tendency to reek when it gets hot. But I´ve long held that most such stenches are avoidable. An awful lot of trash-stink is a consequence of laziness or ignorance or both.

All you have to do, for the love of Bugsy Siegel, is, first and foremost, rinse off unrecyclable containers and things like that before you toss them in the trash.

Second, grind up most of the potentially smelly food-type stuff and send it down to the underworld. (Of course, I´m making the leap here that most American households, except those in New York City, have food waste disposals. They do, don´t they? If not, they should.)

And finally, for the stuff you can´t grind up -- big meat bones, and very little else -- stick it in a bag in the freezer until the night before trash day, then take it out and put it in the garbage can.

I know, I know. Wow, that´s rocket science, Inbox guy. Real Sherlock Einstein-type stuff.

So why don´t more people just do this?

Pete Fehrenbach is assistant managing editor of Waste News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.