Thom Nickels: The trash police

The current sanitation strike in the city got me thinking about the trash police that used to patrol the streets.

They used to appear in my Fishtown neighborhood in the early hours of the morning, well before the scheduled Streets Department trash pickup. If you happened to be inside your house and heard them outside sorting through your trash, your first thought was that homeless people with shopping carts were looking for scrap metal. 

Yet these were not homeless people but uniformed city employees in rubber gloves going through your trash and sorting through bags of diapers, Kentucky Fried chicken bones, orange rinds, Kleenex swabs, and even the remnants of last night’s dinner.   

They were not looking for illicit drugs, but for that one plastic soda bottle you may have forgotten to place in your recycle bin.

When that happened — regardless of the fact that a sloppy passerby may have thrown a plastic bottle into your trash — you were issued a $50 ticket for the infraction.

The City of Philadelphia employed about 47 trash-picking officers in 2017-2018 whose job it is to inspect your trash on trash day for misplaced recyclable items. Ideally, these trash picking inspectors were supposed to grant some leeway if they found a recyclable item. The unofficial but rarely followed rule, as I understand it, was that residents were permitted a couple of misplaced recyclable items in the regular trash but when that number exceeds four or five, that’s when the inspector wrote a ticket.

As I see it, trash police should be looking for blatant violations, such as large bags of recyclable items posing as trash; they should not be nitpicking or looking for a needle in a haystack. This is what they call micro-management overkill, or a desperate attempt—on the city’s part—to make a fast buck. 

It had almost nothing to do with saving the environment. 

Before the pandemic while walking around the neighborhood, I saw a trash inspector going through a neighbor’s bags of trash. I noticed a woman with a bright bleached blonde streak in her hair who looked rather stylish. She was nothing like the shopping cart trash pickers who seem to be able to rip a bag of trash apart with animated gusto. This lady inspected her bags with a great deal of care; opening them and shutting them, feeling the bag’s rough contours, bending down for a closer look, and then standing up again for a scientific nuanced view.

As it was, she wasn’t having much luck because all I saw her do was look and re-look, as if she could not quite believe that she was coming up empty. In many ways she resembled a disappointed treasure hunter. 

I immediately thought of Janis Joplin singing, “Oh Lord, it just can’t be!” 

Then an elderly woman a few doors away — obviously nervous that an inspector was making the rounds — raced out of her house and, in a sort of heart-accelerating panic, went to her trash bags and rechecked them, fearing, obviously, that she had missed a recyclable. 

When I left the scene ten minutes later, the blonde inspector was still trying to find a violation. 

In time the city seemed to lose interest in this kind of heavy policing as the sanitation department itself was discovered to mix all trash, recycles and non-recycles both, and deposit them in the same place.

All of which brings me to the current sanitation strike in the city.

While sanitation workers deserve to make a decent wage, do they have the right to hold a city hostage and endanger its health and welfare in order to force the city to capitulate to its demands?   

I don’t think so.

Anyone who has ever lived in Philadelphia knows the hypocrisy of this town when it comes to litter and trash collection. 

Philadelphia has always had a heavy litter problem. In the neighborhoods, people have been known to stuff trash and even dead pets down storm sewers as if they were trash receptacles. 

It didn’t help that during the last decade or so, the city also began to eliminate trash receptacles in many neighborhoods, forcing neighborhood associations and volunteers to buy trash cans and do the job themselves.

Google “Why aren’t there municipal public trash cans in Philly?” and you’ll get this Reddit response:  

“I moved from [insert some other city here] and they got them. But in all seriousness, is there some specific, practical reason Philly doesn’t have municipal garbage cans? I’ve seen those painted big belly compactors, but those seem like their private/public, and also pretty sparsely distributed.”

The absence of city trash receptacles has caused Philadelphia’s litter problem to implode. 

Philadelphia, simply put, is a city that likes to litter. Litter is in the urban DNA here alongside its misguided love for its sanctuary city status and its ingenious ability to call up thousands of Trump-haters on “No Kings” day. 

The trash strike, meanwhile, continues on its merry way as residents find it harder to obey the mayor’s request to not place bags on street corners or near abandoned buildings.

AFSCME DC 33 meanwhile, has been called out by City Solicitor Rene Garcia, a fellow progressive Democrat, for a host of illegal activities during the strike.

Here’s what she found:

One union guy was arrested for slashing tires. Union strikers also jammed the locks of several city Health Centers while other strikers prevented city residents from dropping off trash at designated city dumpsters. Water was also shut off by strikers at a water treatment facility and trash was physically removed by strikers from (approved) compactors and thrown on the ground.

There were court injunctions (Democrat-against-Democrat) forcing some workers back to work, like the employees of the Philadelphia Medical Examiner’s Office. 

Other court injunctions targeted illegal picketing when strikers attempted to prevent employees from entering city facilities.  

Philadelphia’s last big sanitation workers strike occurred in 1986 when 45,000 tons of stinking maggot-infested trash filled city streets. 

The dire condition in the city at that time caused then Mayor Wilson Goode, a Democrat, to experience a Ronald Reagan moment when he ordered 2,500 trash collectors back to work on Day 18 of the strike after threatening to fire them and hire private contractors. The strike ended after the mayor’s threat.

Mayor Parker, I think, needs to open Goode’s playbook if this strike drags on.

Thom Nickels is a Philadelphia-based journalist/columnist and the 2005 recipient of the AIA Lewis Mumford Award for Architectural Journalism. He writes for City Journal, New York, and Frontpage Magazine. Thom Nickels is the author of fifteen books, including “Literary Philadelphia” and ”From Mother Divine to the Corner Swami: Religious Cults in Philadelphia.” His latest is “Death in Philadelphia: The Murder of Kimberly Ernest.” He is currently at work on “The Last Romanian Princess and Her World Legacy,” about the life of Princess Ileana of Romania.