News
We'll take the trash talk of Chace Anderson any day.
As regards the ridiculous public disagreement between him and Billy Lynch, as ably aired in the City Paper, over the so-called "Nashville Two-Stomp," Anderson is clearly on the side of right.
In essence, a bunch of spoiled Nashville consumers—about 8,000 of them—who can't fit a week's worth of trash into their 96-gallon containers (!) are complaining and asking for more of the giant, tan-colored bins. Solid Waste director Anderson responded to this astonishing insight into just how much crap people generate, then throw away, by advising that these residents stomp on their trash and—shocking, we know—perhaps even consume less and recycle more.
Seems logical to us.
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
|
---------------------------Advertisement---------------------------
|
Public Works director Billy Lynch, however, has said he "totally disagrees with that secondary step" and is in the process of appeasing some residents who say they need 192 gallons worth of containers to dispense with their weekly household waste. "Public Works is holding me hostage to my trash," one particularly obnoxious resident complained recently.
Welcome to the land of rampant consumerism.
Frankly, around the Scene's offices here in Melrose (where we print paper on both sides and live with mounds of recycling until someone has the time to load it into a late-model clunker and drop it off somewhere), it's hard for us to muster a whole lot of sympathy for these oppressed Nashvillians, who are apparently running out of room to dispose of the heavy packaging that their Sam's Club goods come in. When folks a tin can's throw from Belle Meade complain in the local press that it's their God-given right to make as much trash as they want and expect the government to clean it up, no questions asked—well, that's a little hard for us to digest.
In fact, it's precisely this culture of waste—and worse, the sense of entitlement to an unthinkingly disposable lifestyle—that is What's Wrong With America. Buy crap. Throw it out. Dump it in some landfill in a black neighborhood. And dammit, if I want a second or third 96-gallon trash can, you better have it on my doorstep post-haste, 'cause I got stuff to waste.
It's pretty amazing to watch people act like Solid Waste Director Chace Anderson had insulted their mothers by suggesting that—gasp—they should compact their trash so it takes up less space. Sure, his idea is a little on the hokey side (we would have preferred the "Music City Crap-Hop"), but his heart was in the right place: minimizing solid waste. Old Metro hand Billy Lynch should have backed him up.
Unglamorous though it may be, solid waste is an important issue. And given that we pay by the ton to get rid of our waste ($27), maybe now would be a time for city leaders to tell people to shove it—trash that is—farther in their current can.
—Liz Garrigan and John Spragens