Have a 5 week old, and have 4 more days before my bi-weekly expensive garbage pickup comes.... We also have a cat and dog that we clean up after, and to put the icing on the cake my wife decided on Friday night to toss the nasty veggies in the compost rather than a bag to contain the smell....

Long story short midday yesterday I put the bins out on the street 4 days early because I couldn't keep the stench from my closed cans from wafting into the backyard. TERRIBLE! Feel sorry my neighbors and dog walkers, but we have to live without the horrific smell somehow!

Really really really tempted to drive my cans to city hall and just leave them there and order new one...

We definately have more rats - Norway, and wood rats in our neighborhood in NE Portland near 82nd & Sandy Blvd. The neighbor across the street has a wood rat hotel in his tree on the parking strip.

http://animalcapshunz.icanhascheezburger.com/2012/07/31/funny-animal-captions-technically-it-wasnt-even-theirs-anymore/

http://animalcapshunz.icanhascheezburger.com/2012/08/03/funny-animal-captions-the-most-powerful-of-all-weapons/

I have a three year old and a 7 month old, both eating solids and still in diapers. (My toddler clings to pooping in his diaper the way a chain smoker clings to a cigarette. Good thing he likes vegetables.) Anyway, to be honest, you kind of get used to the stench. My neighbors don't, though. And a wall of flies greets me when I open the lid. We don't eat outside as much anymore. Other than that, it's super!

Crab waste sure would add texture to the neighborhood and help bring the issue to a head.

We had a crab feed the other day. The shells and small bits of crab in the shells had a horrific smell waiting for pickup. I guess we'll have to time seafood eating to a day before pickup. Our garbage czars sure aren't equitable. And what do the CoP food czars have to say about discrimination against seafood?

I'm about ready to start taking my 20 month olds diapers down to the mayors house in Kenton. The stench is disgusting and the health factor can't be much better. Adams and the clowns on the council hate families. Really need to move out of this joke of a city ASAP!

Well, we're a household that does indeed have Depends and various other absorbant products going into the garbage can daily. The stench this last week has been dreadful, truly. I may take one commenter's suggestion and put it out by the curb early.

Well, I live in Roseway, and we've been on the system for longer than most. Unlike Mark, we've had no rats to speak of, but that may be due to our cat constantly prowling the premises. However, as all contest, the green can is a stinking fright---the only way to reduce the stench is to constantly clean and scrub it out----no f***ing thanks! Flies galore (which seem to be worse than ever this year) and a hefty stench, but we keep the can on the far side of the house and are lucky enough not to have the scents wafting where we can smell them on a regular basis.

I have a kid in diapers too, but the plastic-bagged (thank god for the foresight to have stocked up on them!)contents not a major problem with the bi-weekly pick-up.

Have to say though---Heiberg is one of the only (if not the only) bill I still send by check, and in my stupidity, forgot to send it this last go round and our service was cut. That day, I called, then drove to their office to pay, and the women there couldn't have been nicer or more accommodating--even waiving the late fee and picking everything up the next day. Made me think of the old-school, Mafia-run commercial garbage outfits I dealt with in certain east coast cities and how the same situation would have been handled!

No problems. The system works just fine for us, family of 6.

Does anybody just resort to using a (gasp!) garbage disposer for the food scraps? Or freezing the big chunks for garbage pick up day? There has to be some way to get on with life without letting the planner babes believe they have this much power.

"Or freezing the big chunks for garbage pick up day?"
JK--- Freezing uses energy.
Sustainable Susan doesn't like you if you waste energy.
And you want Sustainable Susan to like you, don't you?

PS: Be sure to turn off your air conditioner to get extra Sustainable Susan Silver Stars.

Thanks
JK

JK - not sure who Sustainable Susan is, but she doesn't sound like my kind of people. She sounds like she'd be against a cold beer in summer or a hot chocolate in winter and not the kind of person who has much fun. Next time I adjust my AC, I'll think, go ahead, hate me, I'm cool with that. Mmmmm, cooool.

I kinda like the new system. My next door neighbor is a flaming a-hole, guess where my stinky garbage can sits.

On the road again, and around the country folks tell me how "cool" Portland is supposed to be. We try valiantly to disabuse these rubes of this notion. The garbage situation and the debt usually command a certain level of attention.
I sure wish some of the PR money would be spent on things like garbage pick up!
We are doing our part to discourage the hords from moving here.

One baby in diapers and 4 cats. We keep the cans in the garage to discourage raccoons until the night before pickup.

Fortunately we live in Clark County (income tax free): weekly garbage pickup of TWO 32-gallon cans for less than $3/can per week.

{gloating}

Two adults, two dogs, a cat and no kids, and no problem. Green can certainly doesn't smell good, but the combination of 1) having grown up around livestock and 2) having grown up around farm hands with real problems makes the smell seem rather trivial.

Due to an ant infestation, we have completely given up on the slop bucket. We push most of our food debris through the garbage disposal, and throw nearly everything else in the blue bin. My green bin is usually empty, unless I decide to do some tree pruning.

City Hall could care less about the extra time it takes me and others to separate out food scraps. Between my wife and me we spend an extra hour almost per week than we use to. I think the city said we all saved 89 cents on our monthly garbage bills because of the new program. So, city hall actually has effectively made slave labor of citizens.

Now City Hall has this new Arts head tax it wants to drop on 84% of all adult Portlanders. Half it will go to the Regional Arts and Cultural Council (RACC), whose funding is already growing 5% per year according to their IRS filing. And now it will double if the head tax passes in November. Two of the administrators of RACC make well over $100k in compensation (salaries are over $100k alone).

City Hall is charging a premium to live and exist in Portland, and so, I've decided to move to exurbia, unincorporated area; and try escaping, the high end public demands of the city of Portland. In transition.

It's been fine for our family of four. The weekly pickup of the green can was appreciated in the fall and spring when we had extra yard waste. Our garbage has been cut back such that we're considering downsizing to a smaller can to save a bit of money. No smell or rodents, although our can is brewing an ungodly "tea" that I'm not looking forward to having to clean.

However, we've used cloth diapers for our kids, we have both a garbage disposal and trash compactor, and we have a shaded area to keep the cans in to keep the odor down. Those options aren't available to everyone, so I can see how for other households the composting and bi-weekly garbage pickup is more of a hardship.

The only thing that really irks me about the program is that my parents in Clackistan have weekly garbage, yard-debris, and recycling pickup for much less than we pay. "Portland premium" indeed. Gotta keep all those planners employed and producing those lovely, hectoring newsletters, I suppose.

Is there a count of how many planners we have in our area, metro, city and county deciding for all of us how we should live?
Also, on the amount of the money spent on brochures, etc.?

For me, as a visitor, it's not a smell issue. It's a sanitation issue. You leave garbage lying around like that and you are asking for disease.

Jo,
I have frequently brought up this issue.
Where is our Multnomah County health department?

I'm married, we have five kids, two in diapers.

This past week the stench was unbearable and the cloud of flies (how do they even get in there?!) was nauseating. We've been on the "wife puts trash in garage, husband takes trash from garage out to bin later in the day" program so my wife was unpleasantly surprised when she actually put a bag in the bin this week. She complains less than anyone I've ever met, but she commented on the aroma and insects.

And my can - even though I have the biggest size and use the garbage disposal and recycling bin - is crammed full every week. A family our size doesn't stand a chance against the Portland "leadership's" idiotic policies.

A family our size doesn't stand a chance against the Portland "leadership's" idiotic policies.

Could the message be that families are not really wanted in our city
or only those families that readily or can easily comply with the agenda?

Just bring back our weekly garbage pick-up before more problems arise.
In my opinion, we should stop putting food waste in with yard debris, until we have thorough science prevailing here on that decision. This matter should not be determined
by politicians or money trumping the health of our community.

The day it arrived, my slop bucket went straight into the recycling bin.

Just doing my part.

I counted three garbage trucks in my neighborhood a few weeks ago. I was taking a vacation day from work. I watched the trucks to see what was going on, and they each picked up one household's can. There are 7 houses on our block. We needed 4 more trucks to finish the job!

We frequently have Asian college students board with us. Along with showing them where the towels are and how to use the washing machine, we have to show them how to dispose of their garbage.

There are 4 choices:

*food scraps for home composting (fruit/veg scraps)

*food scraps for the slop bucket (as well as some paper, such as napkins and pizza boxes)

*"basic" recycling (paper [other than that listed above], metal, plastic [those shampoo bottles take up too much space in the garbage can], etc)

*"basic" trash

All of this has to be explained to somebody isn't necessarily fluent in English and is jet-lagged to boot.

Dealing with trash shouldn't be a complicated process!

Oh, and I'm also ready to dump the slop bucket ...the neighborhood ants are beating a path to my kitchen counter.

Flies, flies flies! So many flies that we cannot eat outside at our home in Grant Park. I put up three fly traps (the kind with the nasty liquid inside) and all three were full with thousands of dead flies in 7 days! You would be lucky to acquire that kind of volume in a horse barn (which where these kind of high volume traps are usually used). I replaced them all today and have seen no noticeable decrease in the infestation. Caught a norway rat a month ago but haven't seen any since. This is ridiculous and I wonder if this could be resolved with more airtight cans (good luck getting this repealed). IMO it would be nice to find a way for this to work but so far it has been a disgusting failure.

Definitely more flies. Not a pleasant addition to the summer.

What I've been doing since the mandate:

Don't eat fish or seafood unless it's the day before garbage pickup (not good for me for bringing down cholesterol).

Put all foodscraps that I don't put in my compost pile in two plastic bags (double wrapped) so easily furnished by the grocery in the produce/meat section. Yes, the non bio bags! Such a joke that those aren't banned, too. They are thicker than the banned ones (whaddaya thinkin, folks?). NO, I won't buy a freezer to put my waiting garbage in. Are you kidding?

I refuse to encourage insects/flies/creepy goo in the green bin. I also refuse to knowingly buy their compost that they'll sell. Ew!!! I can just imagine how some folks will think they're being 'organic' when they'll be putting baby crud, dead rats and the like in their purity garden.

It's insane.

Mossy,
I also consider it insane.
Some health authority needs to step in and stop this before the soils growing our food are found to be harmed. I am not a scientist so don't know, I just want the whole project to be based on science and not politics. Have no trust whatsoever in the fools who have created this mess!

I live in a apartment complex and our garbage and recycling still gets picked up weekly. Still, when our garbage, which sits in dumpsters in front of the complex, attracts thousands of flies and smells to high heaven in the heat, I can't imagine what it would be like if it sat there for two weeks.

Among his other accolades and ceremonial titles, our Mayor should add, "Lord of the Flies."

Among his other accolades and ceremonial titles, our Mayor should add, "Lord of the Flies."

The devil you say!