By Kate Callen / February 4, 2026 
A constant reminder of our city’s slow collapse sits in the side yard of my house. It is a beat-up black trash bin, and it isn’t going anywhere.
Weeks ago, without notice, crews swept through my neighborhood to haul away the old black bins. Residents like me who didn’t have them at the curb missed the boat.
Trash collectors told me the bin would be picked up the following week. That didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen the week after that.
When you drive around your community, you might see these stray bins lurking about. Some people leave them at the curb like a defiant middle finger. I belong to the group that hides them. I don’t want my neighbors thinking, “Does she really believe the city will pick that up?”
The funny thing is that my bin had been sidelined for more than a year. Remember how the original bins cracked over time? And people would press duct tape over the cracks?
When the tape wore out, crews would stick warning labels like the one that appeared on my bin: We can no longer collect trash from this receptacle. Contact the city for a replacement.
I decided not to wait, so I went to Lowe’s to buy a bin. And that’s when I realized that the old trash bins ruptured because they were made of rigid plastic that splintered with repeated use.
Yup. City Hall paid God knows how much money to God knows which supplier for trash bins that would only last a few years. My 48-gallon Toter bin is made from resilient plastic resin. It has a 10-year guarantee. It cost $85.
I should probably submit a public records act request to find out more about the purchase of low-grade trash bins. Was there due diligence? Was it a no-bid contract? But I don’t need more evidence that our city is badly managed.
And I’m glad the new trash bins are made of sturdy material. It’s the least the city can do, given that new trash fees have jacked up my property taxes by 25 percent. For that kind of money, the bins should be coated with an opalescent honeycomb pattern.
On December 11, I submitted a Get It Done request to have my old bin picked up. I was told the wait time would be 2 to 4 weeks.
Nearly 8 weeks later, I’ve decided to accept reality and repurpose the bin. It now holds leftover lumber from my custom-built catio, the replacement for my original catio after one of my indoor cats found a way to escape through the roof.
I want to end by thanking the city’s trash crews. You serve the public far better than the suits who swan around City Hall. They work for the pols and the privileged. You work for us. Please know we appreciate you.
That’s very interesting, and unfortunate for you. It seems that they do different things for different neighborhoods (or different people).
In my case, here in San Carlos, I followed all their instructions last year for ordering the new bins on their webiste. Subsequently, in December they sent me an email telling me that “Your New Gray Trash Container(s) Will Be Delivered Tomorrow…” and instructed me to “…leave all trash and organic waste containers at the curb…Leave them out until crews complete delivery of your new gray container(s) and removal of your old black ones.” They added that the blue recycle container will be replaced later, with a light blue one. And the green organics containers, if we already have one, won’t be replaced.
That delivery day was my normal garbage pickup day, and the garbage pickup happened as usual, but the black one didn’t get taken away or replaced. So I (and most of my neighbors) left our black bins on the street overnight. Fortunately, the following day a crew came around and replaced the black trash bin with the grey one. So, an overnight delay wasn’t too bad.
I’d sure like to hear the city explain why they don’t consistently treat all neighborhoods (or people) the same way.
We got what we paid for – cheap bins because we paid nothing for trash collection. Read this article if you actually care to understand the reason: https://www.kpbs.org/news/midday-edition/2019/10/14/why-broken-trash-bins-san-diego
And if ~$600 is a 25% property tax increase, it means you were only paying $2400 a year in property taxes. That’s way too little to be in a position to complain or demand gilded trashcans. You are benefitting actively from Prop 13 that has done so much harm to CA city budgets!