The science of garbage disposal. How could I have missed that?

Have you seen this? It is a solar powered trash compactor. There's one across the street from the building where I work. I couldn't figure out what it was for a while. It had a 'Keep Queens Clean' poster on the side, which made it look like it had something to do with garbage or recycling, but the shape is more like a mailbox. And the solar cells on the top were puzzling. So I did a little research, and found out that this is the latest thing in garbage disposal.
For only $4,500, you too can purchase a solar powered trash compactor. The advantage is supposedly that the trash is compacted by a factor of 8. I have to warn you, though, that the lid and chute into which you feed the garbage gets pretty disgusting.

But while we are on the topic of garbage, at least it's better than the garbage cans on my side of the street, which have these attractive rounded tops, with cute little half-circles cut into them to deposit the garbage. The openings are cleverly just a tiny bit smaller than salad-bar take-out containers, thus forcing people to actually carry their garbage back to their desks rather than fill up the cute trash cans.

And that brings us to the trash can in the ladies room at church. I don't like the fact that you have to lift the lid with your hand. Doesn't that sort of defeat the fact that you just washed your hands? And if you take an extra paper towel to lift the lid with, it defeats the purpose of having the garbage can anyway, since you walk out still holding the extra paper towel.

Then there's the recycling notice we periodically get at work. The company wants to recycle all the computer printout. It's a goal I agree with, but the method never quite works. Basically, the problem is that in order to recycle the paper, it has to be separated from other kinds of garbage (such as the salad-bar containers that we carried back to our desks at lunch-time). For a while they actually gave us each two wastebaskets at our desks, that were color coded to separate recycling from garbage. I think that was too much work for the maids -- it's not as trivial as it sounds, because they have about 100 wastebaskets to empty just on one floor. So now they want people to throw only recycling paper into their desk wastebaskets, and to hand carry all other kinds of garbage to the receptacle in the central hallway.

There are a couple of problems with this. One is that I don't think 100 people will bother walking across the entire wing every time they want to throw out a soda can. But even if they solved that part, there is a more fundamental flaw. They haven't quite figured out that the maids empty all the garbage cans into the same big disposal bins for removal. It sort of reminds me of the story of the teen whose mother explained how to sort laundry before sending him to college. He carefully separated the lights and the darks, and then innocently dumped both piles into the same load.