Warbird,
Nobody will ever accuse you of being a pollyanna. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/grin.gif" alt="" />

I have lived in a lot of different areas of this country and trash removal is never free. There are just different ways to pay for it.

In the Keys, the garbage and trash pick up is an addendum on your property tax bill. If you only live at your house in the Keys for three or four months out of the year, you still pay for trash pickup 12 months a year. It's a really good deal for the trash-removal company.

When we lived at Catawba in Ohio, seasonal residents could buy blue bags at the grocery store. You paid X amount for each blue bag, and you put those blue bags out at your curb and they got picked up.

At Put-in-Bay (island in Lake Erie), they used to have the greatest free recycling system ever -- sort of a little plateau you drove up on with your "stuff." Radiating out from the plateau were big dumpsters labeled paper, tin cans, aluminum, plastic, clear glass, brown glass, green glass. It made everybody on the island feel good about having a place to take their stuff to recycle it. I used to have at least 10 different trash cans in my garage, all labeled with the appropriate thing for the recycling hill.

And then it got eliminated, so now we have NO recycling whatsoever and just throw everything in together in our trash. It bothers me a lot. And I don't know where all the stuff goes after it leaves the island on the ferry.

Anyway, at Put-in-Bay we have a choice of (at this point) two trash pickup companies, and you have to contract with them yourself.

In many parts of the country you are dealing with private pickup contractors, it can get really "dirty" when they are competing against each other for your garbage. <img src="http://www.catsailor.com/forums/images/graemlins/smirk.gif" alt="" />

There have always been rumors, of course, that the mafia is involved in the trash removal business.