Some good, old-fashioned trash talk

Next time you drive around town, take a moment to check out all the green trash cans behind buildings, tucked in alleyways and at the end of driveways. Just like license plates from Ohio, they're everywhere.

In fact, according to Environment Canada, a leading environmental group in — you guessed it — French Polynesia, North America produces enough garbage each day to fill 70,000 garbage trucks.

Its Web site says: "Lined up bumper to bumper over a year they would stretch halfway to the moon." Truth be told, they don't know this for sure. Last time they tried, they only got three high.

On average, each one of us produces 4.4 pounds of solid waste each day. (Note: This statistic does not take into account Fox Television executives.) Now this adds up to almost a ton of trash per person, per year. So naturally you are thinking, "Where does all this trash go?"

One word: Uranus.

I kid, I kid. It actually gets buried in the ground somewhere in Iowa. But the more important question is "Who actually picks it up?" Before you blurt out "trash fairy," know that the city of Charleston alone creates 43,000 tons of garbage a year. Which means we need hundreds of people willing to clean up after us. Enter hard-working guys like Sam Smalls and Eugene White. On Monday, I got my own vest, pair of gloves and joined them picking up trash on Route 151 — that's 283 cans of historic trash in downtown Charleston, south of Broad.

I know what you're thinking. And yes, rich people's trash smells just as bad as poor people's.

Smalls and White put me to work quickly, showing me the proper way to dump the cans by using the hydraulic lift. I had trouble at first, but the more I did it, the better I got. Eventually I was able to focus less on operating the lift and more on questions like:

Me: "Should I pick up those bags over there?"

Sam: "Nah. Those are for the recycling people to get."

Me: "What about that corpse?"

Sam: "Yeah, grab that."

Of course, most of the cans were filled with typical stuff like pizza boxes, coffee filters, plastic bottles and the occasional Prussian military sword. But what surprised me was the amount of juice we came across in the trash. No, I'm not talking about orange, grape or prune. I'm talking about trash juice, or as the people in the industry like to call it — "leachate."

I was going to ask Smalls if the smell bothered him as much as it did me, but then noticed he was picking his nose with a straw from an empty McDonald's cup laying in the back of the truck. ("It tickles," he said.)

But what bugged me more than the stench of the Tropicana Trash Juice Cocktail was how rude motorists were. Anytime somebody was behind us on a one-way street, they would throw their hands up in the air or bang on the steering wheel. They acted like it was the end of the world.

I kept thinking: "Cue the violins. God forbid you be three minutes late for your Tai Chi class."