Waste_Inbox

On TV these days, trash is a smash. And that can't help but be good for business and the image of the waste industry.

Garbage and recycling haulers are on screen everywhere these days. Waste Management President Larry O'Donnell was featured on the premier episode of "Undercover Boss," posing as a laborer to handle front-line duties such as collecting trash, sorting of recycling and cleaning portable toilets.

It's all about waste with "Trashmen," which also debuted last week featuring maverick New Orleans garbage entrepreneur Sidney Torres and his company, SDT Waste & Debris.

Meanwhile, trash removal company 1-800-Got-Junk? has been a regular component on the A&E Series "Hoarders," which basically does voluntary interventions for people who can't throw stuff away. And then there's the Discovery Channel show "Dirty Jobs," which the creator Mike Rowe calls the greenest show on TV, with nearly every feature having a recycling element.

The waste industry has always been the poster child for the anonymous job. It's work that is critically essential, but you don't really want to think about how it gets done. Now, in the Reality Show Age, it makes perfect sense that TV would focus on the reality of garbage, one of the few aspects of life that involves every one of us on a continual basis.

It's TV, so it's hard to say just what kind of sustained impact this can have on people's attitudes toward waste and recycling -- if any. These programs first and foremost are entertainment, and people are watching them as such, not to become better environmental stewards.

Still, television has a way of sinking into our consciousness. If we better understand what happens to our trash and recyclables after we dump them, it stands to reason we might start to make smarter choices.

Not to mention gaining some appreciation for the people handling that waste and recycling. We're a society that maintains a dramatic pecking order on the value of jobs. And that's wrong. We need people like the garbage collectors a lot more than we need the billion-dollar entertainers on the rest of those TV channels.

Allan Gerlat is editor of Waste & Recycling News. Past installments of this column are collected in the Inbox archive.

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