This morning

I woke up at 3:34 AM this morning. A man was grunting and mumbling as he peeled off the lid of a trash bin, pulled out three tightly-knotted trash bags, and threw them into the middle of the street directly adjacent to my second-floor flat. It wasn’t particularly jarring or aggressive, but enough to pull my attention away from dreams.

From my bed, I held back the curtain and peeked out onto the road. The unkempt man had a few last drunken words left in him before he made his way around the curb and out of sight. Three plump trash bags lay out in the middle of the intersection, totally in the way. Everything else was still.

I don’t live on a particularly busy part of the Mission. At this time of night, a few cars might drive by my house every five minutes, and about the same number will pass on foot.

I laid there, curious about what was going to happen next. I thought of three possible scenarios.

Potential scenario 1: I would get out of bed and walk downstairs to collect the trash bags.

Potential scenario 2: A car would eventually drive by, and the driver would face the decision to either drive over the trash bags and spill their guts onto the road, awkwardly zig zag around them to get to the other side of the intersection, or get out of the car and move the bags.

Potential scenario 3: Someone else would walk by the intersection sooner or later, and they would face the decision to move the bags, or go along their merry way.

I didn’t get out of bed, I instead kept watching. Two cars opted for the zig-zag option, and one person looked at the bags and kept walking.

Then, within 10 minutes of the bag-throwings, an unexpected thing happened. A pickup truck overflowing with junk pulled up to the scene. The side of the car read “Street Waste Cleaning”.

The driver, wearing a yellow public-works bib, got out of the truck and tossed one of the bags onto the truck bed. The truck was so full of stuff that the bag just tumbled back down to the pavement after first hitting the pile. The worker had to instead carefully place the bag, along with the other two, within the mound.

He got back in his car, whipped out a clipboard to scribble some notes, and drove away.

This was an incredible series of events to me. A random sad guy creates chaos in a quiet corner of the city and walks away, a few people (including myself) recognize the mess’s inconveniences but do nothing about it because it doesn’t affect them, and 10 minutes later someone else shows up to clean it up on the city’s behalf.

I found myself trying to piece together all the motivations that enable this situation.

The unkempt bag-thrower is probably not having a great experience. Maybe certain things aren’t working out as planned, maybe he’s short on motivation, or maybe he feels oppressed by the economic system and the government. So fuck the system, fuck whoever lives in this house, fuck whoever has to deal with this trash, who cares if the plastics within the bag are going to accumulate on street corners and ocean currents, fuck it. He’s going to create waste that someone else will have to pay for, because too often he feels as though he gets the short end of the stick.

Or maybe he’s just drunk and isn’t thinking, I don’t know. One thing is for sure — the bag thrower introduced valueless waste into the system, and if he had felt that he would be the one paying for it, he likely would’ve reconsidered.

The curious, well-off observer lying in bed (me) understands the bag thrower’s sentiment, and isn’t mad or upset at him. He wishes he could sit down and have a conversation with the bag thrower at a more sober hour, just to aimlessly share perspectives. He understands that he can afford to pay more taxes than those with lower incomes, and he’s happy to see his salary’s forced tax withdrawals going to prompt trash pickups. He recognizes, however, this mechanism isn’t efficient because there exists a lack of accountability. Why stop at just three trash bags on one street corner? It doesn’t matter who pays for the trash-bag collection in the middle of the night, the system would be less wasteful if the trash bags stayed in the bin and got taken away with the scheduled garbage collection the next day. Next time a napkin slips out of his hands and blows off into the wind, he’ll go after it with a sense of over-achievement instead of duty since he now feels entitled to a personal clean-up.

He is happy that the guy driving the trash truck at 4 AM has a job that might not have existed in a less-wasteful system, though on second thought, encouraging waste to justify employment seems like a terrible idea.

The public works employee is just doing his job, and he’s thankful for it. He may not find the job that bad, but there are probably many other things he’d rather be getting paid to do.

I guess my overall sentiment here is that everything we do has tradeoffs and every solution we create to mitigate waste introduces new wastes. This is entirely okay. In a way, the whole point of a successful economy should be to encourage progressively less waste—meaning that in order to create value, we must be reducing more economic waste than we are creating, all externalities considered. What I feel is important to note is that we can design economic mechanisms that incentivize creating less waste by holding each other responsible for the waste we each introduce. It sounds obvious, but solving these mechanisms isn’t as easy as arguing for tax-increases as opposed to tax-reductions, or arguing for homeless camp evictions or against it. It’s not a two sided argument, its more like a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle where every person contributes a piece and relies on the shape—or experiences—of the other 999 to form a solution. In an ideal world, if it costs the city around $10 to remove the bags from the road, Bag Thrower should be held accountable for around $10. Similarly, if a textiles factory emits tons of carbon into the atmosphere, they should be commensurately held accountable.

Figuring out how the puzzle pieces should be arranged is the fun part, and its why we should encourage each other to talk about it. We may know the ins-and-outs of the piece we’re individually contributing, but there are 999 more experiences we have to understand in order to approach a solution. It’s going to take some sincere listening and collaboration!

I ended up spending the rest of my time pre-sunrise reading up about the SF Public Works operations. Shout out to these humans looking out! https://sfpublicworks.org/services/cleaning-programs