Five days a week, he collects tons of trash

Tom Stern, 37, prefers the term garbage man, even though his correct title is Refuse Collector III. Don’t call him a sanitary engineer, either. That’s too politically correct for Tom.

“We’re just a bunch of regular guys doing our job,” he said.

For the past 11 years, Tom has collected garbage for the city of Spokane. He likes the independence. Five days a week, it’s just Tom and his automated truck, equipped with a nifty mechanical arm that reaches out and grabs the garbage cart. In Tom’s biz they call it a cart, not a can.

Monday morning, Tom and I spent two hours together on his collection route. We talked trash. Tom and other community refuse collectors are the people I call “occasional regulars.” Our lives intersect with occasional regulars all the time, yet we rarely stop to listen to their stories.

At 7 in the morning, I met up with Tom at the Solid Waste Management department dispatch center on Spokane’s North Side. From here, many of the department’s 183 employees disperse on 63 collection routes. In my childhood here, some of the garbage men were scary-looking, but these modern guys (and almost all are men) don’t look scary at all. They have competitive civil service jobs that require extensive testing and training. The pay for refuse collectors starts at $12.13 an hour and tops out at $18.97.

“Most of them have some college, and we do have college graduates,” said Dennis Hein, director of Solid Waste Management for the city.

In the days before the automated trucks, physical strength was essential for the job, because collectors heaved cans. With automation, hand-eye coordination – needed to operate the mechanical arm – is more important. Folks who grew up playing Nintendo and Atari often do well in garbage collection. Tom, who grew up in Garfield on the Palouse, did a year of community college before joining the Navy and working on an aircraft carrier.

His Monday route started on 12th Avenue and Freya Street and worked east to Havana Street and south to Interstate 90. Though the sun peeked out, that post-Christmas feeling of blah lurked everywhere. Crushed boxes that once held DVD players, dolls and toy trucks were stacked next to the carts. A few people scrambled out in robes and pushed their carts to the curb, startled into Monday by the sound of Tom’s truck.

At one home, two men emerged from their Christmas-decorated dwelling when they saw Tom. They apologized for the super-size load. Tom said, “No problem.”

Though the volume was heavy, the post-Christmas Monday wasn’t the most challenging garbage collection day, Tom told me, and the recycling-truck workers had it worse with all those holiday bottles.

Each person in our community averages 2 pounds of solid waste a day, but if you add in the waste generated by schools, hospitals and stores, it averages out to between 4 and 5 pounds a person, about the national average. Approximately 1,000 tons of waste is sent to the Waste-to-Energy Plant each day; this is generated from both city and county residents, though the city only collects within Spokane’s boundaries. This amount of garbage is equal to the size of seven adult blue whales. Another 400 tons of material gets recycled.

I learned from Tom that we city dwellers can make a collector’s life easier by placing garbage into plastic bags before putting it into the carts. By not placing the carts too close to cars or basketball hoops. By understanding that if you place extra bags next to the cart, you will be charged more.

And people can show their appreciation by smiling and waving at the guys (and those couple of gals) who operate city garbage and recycling trucks.

This time of the year, people thank some of the occasional regulars in their lives, such as mail carriers and newspaper delivery folks with cards and small gifts.

Tom received just five holiday acknowledgments the week before Christmas. He’s not complaining, mind you. But next year, let’s remember to thank those who do our dirty work each day.