Can We (Gag) Talk? It´s a good thing this year´s Major League Baseball All-Star game was held in San Francisco and not across the bay in Oakland. Evidently the ongoing lockout of garbage workers, which is now in Day 11, has the air in and around A´s-town growing fetid, pests running rampant and tempers shooting skyward.

 

Nothing like a mid-July big-city trash pileup to get the blood boiling and the stomach churning. Summertime, summertime, sum-sum-summertime ...

 

File This In The Gray Bin: A recent Harris Poll found that senior citizens lead all other age groups in recycling their home waste. Among those on the north side of age 62, 81% say they recycle at least some of the solid waste they generate.

 

Incidentally, the comparative number for adults as a whole was an also very impressive 77%.

 

Why They Call Them Truisms: Because they´re true, that´s why. Here´s a headline we all can identify with: "Trash Collectors Have A Tough Job." And tough ain´t the half of it. Garbage workers´ jobs are dangerous, too -- too often fatally so. The Bureau of Labor Statistics ranks refuse and recycling collection as the fifth most dangerous job in America. Thirty-two trash workers were killed on the job last year alone.

 

So if you see a neighbor kid go tearing around a trash truck that´s crawling up the street, next time you see him, buttonhole him and tell him that´s unacceptable behavior and he´d better knock it off.

 

Let´s treat garbage collectors with the care and respect they deserve. They´re doing important work for us.

 

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

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