Trash Compactor Bags

Trash compactors are extremely convenient and fantastic devices, unless you’re in a situation like mine. My roommate and I recently moved into a new apartment. We are both recent college grads and have been living in a college style house with four other people who went to the same school. Needless to say the old place was a dive and we promised ourselves that we would keep the new apartment clean. The new place had a trash compactor.

At first I was excited about having the trash compactor. First of all, I love robots, I own a sick Roomba and a Scooba from iRobot. Second, I do not like taking trash out, especially living in the city. There are a couple of reasons that I do not like taking the trash out. The one thing that you do not have in the city is space and a trash compactor helps out with saving space inside the apartment (no big bin in the house). Second, the trash compactor bags are much smaller and take up less space in the communal garbage cans that are shared with co-tenants in an apartment building. Third, the bags were really strong. I loved it and did not mind the smaller size due to their strength, but I found that I had to make a lot more trips. The extra trips with the trash compactor bags would not be a problem, except for the fact that we have rats out in our back ally. I found myself putting off trips to the garbage out back and pretty soon my roommate and I had a small pyramid of densely filled trash compactor bags hanging out next to our back door. He did not want to go outside and face the rats. I did not want to go battle the rats either. The product that we thought was going to make our life more clean and better was creating a total mess and was starting to cramp our lifestyle. The roomba was getting trapped and not doing a great job. My roommate and I had to make a game day decision. Would we keep using this machine or would we ditch the smaller trash compactor bags in lieu of moving back to the big thirty or fifty gallon trash bags along with corresponding gigantic trash can that lives in our kitchen, taking up a ton of space.

The gigantic trash can makes the house smell if you are not careful. The trash compactor never did that because we would take the trash out more frequently, but the rat dilemma ended that benefit. I also found that these bags were a lot stronger than the normal bags. I had a lot less tears and messes a la the Glad commercials. But the pile because of our laziness was getting bigger and the rats were no less scary. Finally after a furious game of rock, paper, scissors my roommate and I decided to stop using the machine. We switched back to the big standard trash barrels.

We had less trips to the shared trash cans out back and that meant less rat encounters. Ultimately we decided to deep six the use of the trash compactor. Now the device rests idle, but the roomba still holds down the robot fort.