GARBAGE TRUCK VIDEOS FOR KIDS FULL

My students go out of their way to build side tables out of old VHS cassettes, and kinetic pelican sculptures out of scavenged bleach bottles and PVC pipe, for gosh sakes. Here in the bubble, recycling and composting are the law for households and businesses alike. And of course, you can always just buy less crap. Building material salvagers are on the rise Craigslist and Freecycle make it a snap to sell or donate just about anything that can still be used. Recycling databases at websites like and make it simple to find local recyclers for even the most exotic goods.

But I’m just one guy, darn it, I can’t save them all.ĭoing something decent with your castoffs has never been easier. I paid $20 for a car much like these on Craigslist last year, and would happily have offered $35 for the pair. It’s like watching a snuff film about toys. I usually enjoy the garbage videos almost as much as my son does, but seeing two perfectly good toy cars - the Flintstonesque foot-powered ones kids ride in - pitched into a formidable McNeilus front-end loader is too much. In one particularly heartbreaking YouTube moment, senseless violence is committed against what appears to be an entire toddler-hood worth of playthings. To support our nonprofit environmental journalism, please consider disabling your ad-blocker to allow ads on Grist. Is the home basketball hoop a little banged up? Toss it in! Have a five-piece living room set that clashes with the new drapes? Grind it up! An unwanted toilet? In it goes! But it’s the exotic items that really surprise. Some households astound by sheer volume - eight, 10, or 12 black garbage bags per pickup elicit nary a comment nor complaint from the municipal workers in their fluorescent green safety vests. They see everything from traditional rear-loaders, to automated side- and front-loaders, to the exotic knuckle boom trucks that look like those arcade games where you try to grab a stuffed doll by the head with a set of metal claws.Īnd here’s what else the kids see: that every last manifestation of the American dream of disposable consumption can be hauled to the curb and disappeared into the crushing jaws of a garbage truck.

Home-shot compilations with titles like “ Garbage Trucks Part II” and “ Types of ‘Garbage Truck’” amass millions of views, mostly, presumably, by delighted youngsters. If you don’t have young children, you might not be aware that the garbage truck video is a robust genre.

GARBAGE TRUCK VIDEOS FOR KIDS FULL

(Not every day, and with full parental participation - c’mon bubble people, a *little* screen time isn’t going to hurt him.) In between garbage days, we sometimes watch garbage truck videos on YouTube.

But I never really understood how bad America’s garbage problem is until I found a trove of wildly explicit videos documenting it on YouTube.Īt home, “garbage truck!” was among my son’s first phrases, followed closely by words such as “recycling!” and “compost!” The kid loves everything to do with tossing items into cans, wheeling them to the curb, and, best of all, waiting for the awesome machines that come once a week to grab and hydraulically dump! dump! dump! the carefully sorted stuff into their hungry mechanical maws. Every perversion ever known is freely displayed online, of course. But still, I was recently reminded that some Americans continue to use incandescent light bulbs, and I was genuinely surprised.Ī far bigger shock came unbidden, as they usually do, from the internet. I come from the outside world, so I know my current behavioral baseline is a little skewed. Worse, I teach environmental sustainability at Stanford, where I’m surrounded by bicycle riding, reusable-mug toting, enthusiastically composting colleagues and students. It’s called San Francisco, and it is a magical place where everyone recycles, no one smokes, and Nancy Pelosi is considered distressingly conservative. Photo: Jo Morcom This story is cross-posted from The Last Word on Nothing.

Garbage truck videos for kids