To the editor:

In this space last week Warren Corman called for the exercise of some common sense in the way we manage our trash (as have others, though not in so many words); I heartily second the motion.

Similar to Warren, our 25-year-old, 30-gallon, $9.99 trash can is on track to outlast us and, like him and many others, we recycle at Walmart, compost everything (we do not send our garbage to the sewer treatment plant) and we use all our yard waste as mulch, kindling or firewood. Our can is set out for pickup no more than 20 times a year (so why would we want to pay monthly rent on an even larger cart?) We have no space to accommodate a 45-gallon cart — much less two of them — and the idea of the city spending $1 million on 22,000 carts (thus sending the existing 22,000 cans like ours to the landfill) is profligate in the extreme.

Everyone compares this “Great Recession” to the Great Depression; well, having experienced the latter (though not quite as much of it as Warren), I can assure you that we didn’t weather it by spending, rather by exercising common-sense frugality. We are still exercising it and we highly recommend it to other individuals, institutions and governments.