Garbage, trash, rubbish

Since living in Sackville, D and I have had some difficulty figuring out what to do with our garbage. In previous places we have lived, the rules have been pretty simple and similar from place to place. In previous places (Vancouver, Surrey, Austin) glass, plastic, cans, and paper products can be recycled, and everything else goes in the regular garbage.  In Sackville, garbage is separated into wet and dry. The first day we got to our house, we found this nice laminated list of trash items that are wet, dry, hazardous household waste.

You would think it would be fairly straight forward, but honestly, I don't think anything has ever caused us this much confusion in our lives. First we had to go get the appropriate coloured bags. Green for wet and blue for dry. Then we had to try to remember which one was which. When I first set them up in our dual garbage cans, I put all of the wet stuff in the blue (dry) bag. So then I had to take the blue bag and put it in a green bag. There was no threat of fines if we got it wrong, like I have seen in Ontario, but I was still worried we might get arrested by the garbage police. Okay, so we had our bags and we had the colour system figured out. Then came the debates over pretty much every thing we put in the garbage.

Some things were obvious. Paper goes in dry. Banana peels go in wet. What about a juice box? The dry list said, "Dry waste must be clean to ensure it can be recycled."  A juicebox could not be rinsed out because the hole was so small and there was usually a tiny bit of juice left behind. So it wasn't really dry and clean. But D was convinced that the wet garbage should only contain compost materials, so he wouldn't let me put it in there either. He thought that there must be a third type of bag that we should use for non-compostable and non-dry garbage. I looked it up online, and it seemed like there were only 2 categories - wet and dry.

Every time we went to put something in the garbage for the first few weeks we had to check the list. Old socks?  Dry.  Paper towel? Wet. Broken dishes? Dry. Pencil shavings? Wet. Tim Horton's coffee cup? I say wet, D says dry. You can see how confusing it might be.

The other day at school, I saw a sign that clarified things a bit more for me. It said, "If you wouldn't put it on your head, it's wet waste." Ha! I have been using that as my reference point. And it does seem to help...a bit.