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Hello, and thank you for joining me for another episode of the Ben’s pest control podcast. And today we have something that I want to talk about because we we have kind of a serious situation going on in our town. And here in Port St. Lucie right now we are going through a little bit of an issue. And I shouldn’t even minimalize it to say a little issue, but we are going through an issue with our trash pickup service. And I want to be very clear to specify that I’m not making this podcast to bash the trash company that is definitely not my goal in recording this or putting this out there. My goal is to get us to understand what’s going on what we’re seeing, and kind of discuss my understanding of what is coming and how. Hopefully, we have to prepare for that. So let me start by saying if you go back a few months, I know that our company had problems finding employees. And what initially happened was in my area, we had trash pickup on Mondays and Saturdays. I’m sorry, not Mondays and Saturdays, Wednesdays and Saturdays. Anyways, what we found was it started by the first couple of times, we weren’t getting our recycling picked up. So on Saturday, we put out our recycling bin and nobody would come and Sunday our recycling bin would sit out and then Monday, our recycling bin would get picked up. And then it became Tuesday. And eventually, it seems like it became now all Sunday didn’t show up to pick up our trash, whether it was on Wednesday or Saturday. And as most of us now know we’re only getting trash picked up once a week. And recycling isn’t getting picked up at all. So for some people, you may be wondering, well, why is the pest control guy talking about our trash pickup?
Well, I can tell you that we have received calls and have been getting calls and, and dealing with situations associated with this trash situation that we’re dealing with. So I’ll give you a couple of examples. Just last week, we had numerous calls for people that are now getting inundated with flies. In one case, we went out to one lady’s house, and she had flies coming through her window and she said she had seen about 20 to 40 flies. And it was really kind of freaking her out because they were coming into our master bathroom window. And there were a lot of them. Another gentleman, he had gone away and came back home. And when he came into his house in his kitchen, there was a pile of maggots. And for those of you who don’t know, maggots are the flies in their developmental stage. And he just found a stack of them on his floor. Well, one of the things that I personally have seen when my trash sits out, and in some cases, because I still don’t know which day they’re going to show up. I’ll put my trash out sometimes on Wednesday, sometimes on Thursday, and your trash sits out in the sun, all of that decaying food becomes a perfect breeding ground for especially things like flies. Now, flies are just kind of the most common thing that we see. But we’re also seeing an increase in roaches, ants and wildlife that are taking advantage of this food sitting around and the abundance of it that they are able to consume. So it’s affecting a lot of different things when it comes to bugs. Now, one of the things I would say is my understanding is that Port St. Lucie is going to be going to a garbage service that’s going to pick up once a week. And one of the things that’s going to be very important for everybody to remember is if you keep your trash bin whether in your garage or outside, one week is a long time to have food sitting in your bed.
Especially when it’s 100 degrees. Now I say 100 degrees, I know what the weatherman says it might be 9091 92 but when you add in the heat index, a lot of times it’s well over 100. And so all that food sitting in your trash bin is now rotting and decaying and spoiling and it is going to draw stuff to your house. So I can’t tell anybody how to live. But what I can tell you is I have done this for 28 years and I’ve been in other parts of the state where they only have trash pickup once a week. And for some of those people, what they will do is they were litter Really take out, take their dirt garbage at the end of, let’s say dinner, and they have bones and they have food leftover. And normally, they would scrape that into the trash can. Well, I know a lot of people who take that they scrape it into ziplock bags, and they put it in their freezer. And they leave it in their freezer till the next night before trash pickup or till the morning of trash pickup. And then they take that food and they throw it into the trash receptacle. And I know for a lot of people, that’s a lot of work. Now, the other thing a lot of them do is if the food can go down the garbage disposal, they’ll run it down the garbage disposal. Now, it’s very important that you know, and parts and let’s see if you still have a septic tank, my understanding, and I could be wrong on this, it is not okay to be running food down your garbage disposal into a septic tank that can damage your septic tank, and I don’t want anybody to think that’s okay.
So for those people, it’s going to be more important that they find a way to store that. So you don’t end up with the issues that are coming along. I know in this episode alone, I discussed the flies, I discuss the roaches, I discussed the ants, I mentioned the animals. But we haven’t even begin begun to discuss the smell. One of the things a lot of us are going to go through here with this is if you start throwing food in your can for a week, and it gets hot, there are things that are going to cause that garbage to smell. And it is going to be horrific. And it’s going to create an environment that is very, very unpleasant. And that smell might be in your garage. If you keep your cans outside that smell could just be around the cans. If the wind blows hard that smell could affect your house, your neighbor’s house. And in winter, if you leave your windows open, it could be a real problem coming inside. So that’s a whole different factor that plays into all this. And we need to be prepared and we need to be thinking as as homeowners how we’re going to hopefully prevent these bugs from becoming a problem in our house. And, and one of the things that may also be more important now with with pickup only once a week is it may become even more important to have your cans cleaned out. Once they do pick up. My understanding is they’re going to be giving us some very large garbage bins, I don’t know if I’ve got the number right in my head, I think they said like 94 gallon garbage containers that we’ll be throwing our trash in. And if they’re only picking up once a week, it’s gonna be very important that everything that that’s in there hopefully comes out so you don’t jam that bin so full that garbage sticks in the bottom of that can. So when they lift it up, and they dump it into the truck, heaven forbid any of it sticks to the bottom of the can. And cleaning out your bins are probably going to be more important because as that that the juices from all that trash sit in the bottom of that can that’s going to create an environment where things like flies, maggots, ants, roaches, any opportunistic creatures gonna want to come to and take advantage of.
So it’s going to be a very interesting process as we move forward. And a lot of us are going to have to figure out how we’re going to adapt to this, this new trash pickup and ironically, I was talking to one of my customers today and they were talking about the trucks that that pick up those bins, we’re gonna have to make some adjustments even to how we address where we put our garbage bins to be honest with you. These trucks are not small those arms take up some room. If you live in an area where you got some mature trees, you may not be able to put your receptacle banner, your garbage bin underneath those trees, that arm is going to have to reach out grab your can pick it up dump it. I pray for everybody in Port St. Lucie that you know, we don’t have problems with them accidentally grabbing mailboxes, if you put your cat by the mailbox, you may have to move your cat away from it, there’s definitely going to be some thought put into the initial process of of getting ready for this. So it’s not just gonna be what are you gonna do with your food in your garbage? It’s going to be where are we putting the can and then cleaning the can and just following up because there’s going to be a lot of issues associated with this. This pickup only once a week and, and food is one of the essential things all living creatures need to survive food, water and shelter. And so we know what’s coming. We already are kind of going through it we just have to prepare ourselves. So again, this is Ben with Ben’s pest control. If you have any questions or if you’re experienced So any problems please give our office a call at 772-878-1972 Or feel free to check out our website at WWW dot Ben’s pest up is and thank you and I hope you have a great day
