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by Erik Hare

Spring cleaning is an old tradition, where the house is spruced up once it’s warm enough to air things out.  But it’s just as important to get the house ready for the long winter, where the last thing you want to do is spend the long interior days looking at a bunch of junk.  That’s where the neighborhood clean-up comes in.

All of us need to rent a dumpster once in a while just to get rid of the junk we’ve accumulated.  Old papers, dead appliances, broken bikes, and all the other useless trash just takes up space in our lives.  If you’ve been living well, however, you don’t really need a whole dumpster to yourself.  It’s good to share one with your neighbors who might be in a similar situation if you can coordinate the whole thing.

In Saint Paul, every fall each neighborhood does just that but on a grand scale.  Our neighborhoods average about 14,000 people, so you can imagine that an organized collection takes more than just one dumpster.  That’s where Eureka Recycling comes in, sorting out what can be chopped or melted back into something useful.  They do it up in a big way, with large trucks available for every kind of trash you can think of.

The need for a neighborhood clean-up comes from the unique way we haul trash in Saint Paul.  We don’t.  Everyone is on their own to find a trash hauler because the city doesn’t do it for us.  What the city does is contract with Eureka to take away all the recyclables weekly, providing us with a great incentive to recycle as much as we can.  The current estimate is that half of our trash is recycled, and there’s a plan in place to get that up to three quarters.  Along with this great incentive comes another unwanted incentive, however, which is the tendency to hold onto stuff that would be expensive to get rid of on its own.

Once a year, however, we make it simple.  Averaging about $10 a carload people can take just about anything over to the central collection point and get rid of it once and for all.  Even if it’s just trash that can’t be recycled, you can get rid of it.

Not only is this a great chance to get rid of stuff once and for all, but it’s also a party just like any other neighborhood gathering.  There’s always some food, and Carolyn brings her garden-fresh pickles to be sampled along with a lot of other things.  That’s the way we do it on the West End at our clean-up held yesterday.  Why just get rid of junk when you can make a social event out of it?

Fall cleaning is always a bit more satisfying no matter what.  This is a good time of year to be serious about your space, and it’s great to have it nice and tidy.  Neighborhood clean-ups are one of our traditions that help make it both easier and a lot more fun in the neighborhoods of Saint Paul.  If you live somewhere that doesn’t have such an event, you might want to start one on your own.  All it takes is a dumpster – and maybe a grill and some hot dogs.