96 gallon trash cans - love 'em or hate 'em? (Houston: HOA, condo) - Texas (TX) - City-Data Forum

texas7 · 04-11-2011, 08:21 PM

Do you live in a neighborhood that has moved to the mandatory 96-gallon rolling trash bins and only once a week pick-up?

What do you see as pro's and con's? This is a huge debate in my area right now and I'm honestly not sure which group to side with.

NTT · 04-11-2011, 08:54 PM

My neighborhood is in the process of this change too. I'm quite worry that I wouldn't be able to handle a 96-gallon trashcan. I am currently using a 50-gallon size which is more manageable being in a wheelchair. Yet, I rarely filled it up. The 96-gal would be too big for me to roll it to the front. Not to mention, I would have to roll myself in the wheelchair,onto the main street in order to face the trashcan in a certain way for auto pick up. If I get injured or killed, guess who gets the blame?!

Fortunately, the Waste Management company was at the Woodlands Art Festival this past weekend. I got to talk to them and they will check out this issue for me. I'm not against it, I just need a shorter trashcan in order to see when I'm moving it.

I'm also worry that when the neighborhood goes with the 96-gallon auto pick up, instead of 2x a week, they may change the pick up to once a week like in my brother's neighborhood. The neighborhood will surely stink up in the hot summer heat if the trash is picked up only once a week. And when a holiday falls into trash day, that'd be 2 weeks before the trash is picked up.

Oh, and I just remember another problem. During this time of the year, there are alot of leaves and stuff from the oak trees falling. This accumulates to 3-4 trashbags that won't fit all in just one 96-gallon trashcan. I can't carry the trashbags in and out for the once a week heavy trash pick up. So, these trashbags will end up sitting in front of my house for the whole week. It would be unreasonable for me to pay extra for another trashcan that I'd be using only 2 months out of the whole year.

I sure didn't ask for this when I purchased this house. I'm sure I wouldn't have purchased it if this was mendatory back then. I feel like, live with it or move. Moving is sure not possible for me right now. It is so unfair for the HOA to change such a major thing in the neighborhood. I really don't know what else to do.

elnina · 04-11-2011, 09:01 PM

Way to big for one person household. I can't fill it even in a month, so I am taking it out every 2 weeks half empty...

kreeyax · 04-11-2011, 09:02 PM

I lived in a neighborhood that went from twice a week of using your own cans to once a week 96 gallon cans. The biggest issue for me was the size of two of those cans (one for recyclables) taking up a lot of space in my small garage. And the garbage sure stinks in a hot garage after a week or so. One of the positives though is that you can just throw unbagged trash into the container since the truck dumps everything out of the can. When we had guys manually picking up the trash twice a week they wanted everything bagged.

elnina · 04-11-2011, 09:18 PM

^^^ Unbagged trash will stink even more in your garage, not mention maggots.....

kreeyax · 04-11-2011, 09:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by elnina

^^^ Unbagged trash will stink even more in your garage, not mention maggots.....

By unbagged trash I mean the non-organic stuff. Most anything you throw away that doesn't come from your kitchen or bathroom. That stuff I refer to as garbage.

texas7 · 04-11-2011, 09:30 PM

Unbagged means you need to wash out your can more often to control odor and just plain yuck that gets in it. The size is what everyone is complaining about and how ugly these will look setting between the homes as most people probably won't put in their garage.

jfre81 · 04-11-2011, 11:18 PM

It's entirely too big, but I expect we'll see more of this sort of thing as part of across-the-board budget slashing in the coming years.

kixette · 04-12-2011, 08:12 AM

i live in a condo - my pet peeve about them (which i do like mine because in the summer we sure have a lot of trash!) is that the other tenants don't roll theirs under their houses - they leave them out in the driveway and just walk their trash out. sometimes i get ambitious and roll them all where they belong but i shouldn't have to do that! But we get pickup twice a week in the summer due to tourism.. only once a week in the "off' season.

LilyLady · 04-12-2011, 08:27 AM

Although I'm not in Houston anymore, I hope it's okay to post in this thread.

We live in a neighborhood where our trash is picked up once a week and each house is assigned one of these 96-gallon containers. Our city contracts out the service. In Houston, we had trash pickup twice a week. It took some doing to get used to once a week service.

Quote:

Originally Posted by elnina

^^^ Unbagged trash will stink even more in your garage, not mention maggots.....

Or rodents. They like the loose stuff too and don't think they can't get into those cans (eventually).

Quote:

Originally Posted by texas7

Unbagged means you need to wash out your can more often to control odor and just plain yuck that gets in it. The size is what everyone is complaining about and how ugly these will look setting between the homes as most people probably won't put in their garage.

It's the washing of the containers that is a real problem for me. I'm not tall and I can't reach the bottoms to scrub them and the containers are so large that I can't turn them over easily to get the water out.

Because there is no HOA telling us otherwise, we can leave the containers outside our homes or in our back yards. No one in this neighborhood uses their garages to store them, mostly because of the smell. Yuck!