Did you know there are a lot of rules when it comes to residential garbage collection? If you don’t, chances are you’re not following all the rules.

In this story, one garbage collector knows the rules, and he also knows how to help out homeowners who don’t follow the rules. For one homeowner, this is a problem.

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Don’t touch my Garbage!

Backstory: I work as a sanitation engineer with a primary focus on residential communities (i’m a garbage collector for houses (see, it makes sense now)).

Our collection is handled “automatically”, our trucks have a hydraulic grabber that we control from inside the cab to grab carts and dump them into the truck, we generally do not need to get out of the truck, we’re not manually lifting and tossing garbage, it’s a pretty easy gig.

What most people don’t realize is the RULES for garbage collection.

There are reasons there are rules.

There are A LOT of rules placed on homeowners/residents: what materials are acceptable, size limitations, if your garbage bin lid isn’t fully closed, and a “big” one is bin placement.

All bins need to be 1 meter away from, basically anything else, parked vehicles, other bins. this is to ensure ease of using the hydraulics to grab the bins, and also to prevent possible damage like scraping someones car or busting a headlight or something.

Generally this isn’t an issue in that, with a bit of practice you get good at grabbing bins even if they’re parked right beside each other, or we’ll just hop out of our truck, move the bin a little so it’s easy to grab and then move it back.

There are two reasons they do this.

Reasoning for this is 1: we’re not jerks, and it’s just the nice neighborly thing to do since myself and most of my colleagues live in the same community we work and…

2: it’s actually A LOT of paperwork for us to fill out for violations, so it’s significantly easier to just take the 30 seconds to move the bin then the 5 minutes to do all the paperwork to issue a violation ticket.

Now, onto the real story.

Story: We service a community that does both garbage and recycle on the same day, 2 bins, 2 trucks, 2 drivers.

Most residents will put both bins side by side touching each other (a violation) so what we’ll do is which ever truck gets to the location first will grab their bin, dump it then move it maybe a foot or 2 away from the other driver’s bin so the second driver has an easier time grabbing it.

It saves time for for us, and makes things run smoother. and we don’t get complaints from people…. until we do.

They decided to take the complaint very seriously.

A resident complained that we were “moving her bins” and word travelled to the higher ups myself and my colleague got disciplined, instructed to places bins back “exactly where we got them from” and then were monitored via our dash cams for a few weeks to ensure compliance and out supervisor would take a trip out to the specific resident who complained after our shift to ensure the bins were not moved.

Not appreciated being discipled so severely because someone had to take 2 extra steps to get one of her bins we complied to the letter with her request.

Unfortunately for her she had a habit of placing her bins side by side, which is a spacing violation. so for 2 MONTHS, every week we would get to her residence, bins are side by side, so we can’t grab them due to not enough space, fill out paperwork for a violation and place the violation ticket on her bins, and not dump her bins.

It took her long enough!

She finally got the hint after about 2 months and started spacing her bins 3 feet apart, and never complained about us moving her bins again.

She also had to pay several small fees for extra pickup, since by the time she figured it out she had several bins full of garbage and regulations are 1 bin dump per resident, anything extra is a not insignificant fee per extra bag.

I never knew garbage bins were supposed to be spaced apart. I also put them side by side. I guess you learn something new every day! Of course, I’d never complain about a garbage collector moving my bins a few feet.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

A retail worker shares their perspective.

This person shares praise for their local sanitation workers.

Here’s another story about a garbage collector who went above and beyond.

Another person appreciates garbage collectors.

This has to be one of the most unappreciated yet vitally important jobs.

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