“Ew,
it’s the actual bins,” said Ashita Trika, 39, a senior product manager
with an M.B.A. who lives in a single-family home in San Francisco with
her three children and husband, Noble Athimattathil. “I have no idea
what he does, I just know it gets done,” she said of the garbage
procedure. “Sometimes I’ll see the empties on the curb — but I don’t
bring them in or anything. Noble owns trash end to end. He takes the
mental load and the physical load. It’s freeing.”
Mr.
Athimattathil, 40, grew up in Yonkers, where he said his father always
took out the trash, until he passed the job down. “My sister and I
would both be sitting on the couch watching TV,” he recalled. “And my
dad would always say: ‘Noble, take out the garbage.’ Why not my
sister? She had two arms and two legs!”
Nancy
Casey, 41, a nurse practitioner in Portland, Ore., isn’t fazed by
garbage. (“Eh, I’m up in vaginas all day.”) Still, it’s her husband’s
job. “I do everything else,” Ms. Casey said.
Trash
night in Portland is especially taxing, she said, because it occurs
only once every other week. Moreover, the standard bin is half the
size of the compost and recycling, which are picked up weekly. “It’s
the liberal hippie thing. There must have been some kind of movement,”
said Ms. Casey, who grew up in Chicago.
She
added: “If we ever have extra space in our can it’s like Christmas!
And we start running around the house looking for things to throw in.”
Rarely
is “Who’s on Trash?” an actual discussion among couples. The division
of labor just happens. But Deya Warren and her husband, Gus, likely
talked about it, she said, if only because they were given a book
before getting married called “The Hard Questions,” which offers
discussion topics like: “Do we eat out a lot? Or a little?” “What kind
of bed do we sleep on? A king size? A water bed?” (Water beds?)
“The
whole idea was that you should talk about the little things because,
over time, they inevitably become bigger things,” said Ms. Warren, a
39-year-old entrepreneur and mother of three in Bronxville, N.Y.
“Trash beyond grosses me out. I know it’s a gender stereotype, but I
don’t care. I’m the one with the drill! I’ve dismantled our broken
dishwasher and put it back together! I’m confident enough in my
defiance of traditional roles. Gus can take out the garbage.”
What
about all the single ladies, that highly scrutinized cohort?
Sophie
Galant, 24, a consultant, lives with female roommates in a San
Francisco apartment and routinely passes the honor of trash duty to
guy friends who come for dinner. “I always ask them to take it out on
their way out,” she said. “It smells. And I don’t want it to drip on
me.”
Laura
Manzano, 26, who moved from her college dorm in Virginia to a
three-unit building in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn, has never
dealt with the trash. “Anthony does it all,” she said
matter-of-factly, referring to her superintendent. “We don’t even tip
him. Maybe I should start?” (Yes. )
Elizabeth
Hand, 41, a stay-at-home mother in the Cobble Hill neighborhood of
Brooklyn, long had a helpful neighbor. “This elderly Italian man named
Augie who’d lived here forever,” she said. “He would just do it for
us. I had no idea how much work it was, until he passed away. We miss
him.”
Trash
chutes in the hallways can make the task easier for apartment
dwellers, though some still struggle. “Tom has a habit of taking the
trash out from under the kitchen sink, tyingthe
tall bag, then just leaving it on the floor, in the garbage can — but
obviously unusable, now that it’s tied,” said Jenny Patt, a lawyer who
lives in Peter Cooper Village in Manhattan, referring to her partner.
“As though that counts for something.”
When
quarters are close, there are often heated battles over bins, on whose
property they should reside, and who lugs them out each week.
In
a recent thread on Nextdoor,
the regional social network, a man in the Carroll Gardens neighborhood
of Brooklyn asked people to petition the city to change their
collection time from morning rush hour to off-peak hours. This set off
impassioned, paragraphs-long responses, including complaints over
noise; comparisons to Europe; scorn at the offense of commuting by
car; and the general sentiment that bags are more efficient than bins,
and that the city’s metal trash cans of yore were barbaric.
(But
are Manhattan’s Hefty mountains any better? Apparently people think
so. Rats seem to like them as well.)
Recycling
has added to the burden. “It’s insane how much cardboard we generate,”
Ms. Herman said. “We get Amazon, like, daily. Fresh Direct, Blue Apron
… We have a whole staging area! Sometimes, its stacked to the
ceiling.” Some admit to such anxiety about box breakdown that they get
packages sent to work.
Dawn
Perry, 38, the food director at Real Simple magazine, is a
self-proclaimed recycling Nazi. “I went to Boulder,” she said,
referring to the eco-conscious college in Colorado. When Ms. Perry and
her husband, Matt Duckor, moved to a garden apartment in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, they started seeing some “crazy behavior in the
trash bins,” she said. Like plastic where clearly only paper should
be. (And don’t even get her started about the lack of curbside
composting.)
“One
day I semi-aggressively said to a neighbor: ‘Are you going to break
that down?’” Ms. Perry said. Mr. Duckor furthermore printed (and
laminated) diagramed recycling directions to post above the shared
bins. He also mentioned a recent maggot issue. “All he had to say was
‘maggots,’” Ms. Perry said, “and people listened.”
Last
year, Danielle Fennoy, 37, and her family moved from a 45-unit
building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, to a triplex in
Bedford-Stuyvesant. “It was the biggest wake-up call on the planet,”
said Ms. Fennoy, the co-owner of Revamp Interior Design. “I thought:
‘Seriously? Now I’m the trash lady?’” An early riser, she would put
out the bags before work, a method that avoided rodent, or human,
invasion. “I’d be out there in my jammies, with my neighbors. That
part was nice. The camaraderie. ‘Like, here we are … trash day, again.’”
Until
one trash day, she had a revelation: “I woke up and said, ‘You know
what? I’ve got enough on my plate.’” She told her husband to take over
trash. “And he was, like, ‘O.K.’”
Lauren
Gersick, 36, a college counselor in San Francisco who shares the chore
with her wife, believes that garbage night’s gender divide isn’t so
much about women eschewing heavy bins or leaky bags. It’s not about a
fear of rats or raccoons, or some sort of contrarian feministic
stance.
It’s
about men’s desire to get out of the house, Ms. Gersick thinks; a
sanctioned opportunity to step out, away from the children and the
chaos, into the dark solitude of night.
“I
know at least when I do it,” she said, “I’m like, ‘Bye! I’m going to
do the trash.’”