Bermuda throws away more trash per person than the USA. The men and women working Bermuda?s fleet of trash trucks don?t need to be reminded of this fact, because they know from sweaty experience exactly what it means to deal with the results of such an extensive throwaway society.

Travelling up and down the roads and lanes gathering rubbish bags and emptying bins, dealing with overflowing rubbish communal lock-ups at condominiums and facing unsightly mounts of trash left in full view of tourists.

Comparative figures in 2003 showed that the average Bermuda resident was responsible for tipping 5.7 pounds of trash away each day compared with the average American?s 4.5 pounds of rubbish.

In 2005 the Island generated 67,262 tonnes of garbage, surprisingly a drop from the 2004 figure of 72,858 tonnes, but the overall trash generation trend is for a three percent increase year-on-year. The drop may have been a result of a change by some cruise ships to cater for their own waste collection.

The questions remain. Why is there so much rubbish? Where does it all go? Does any of it get recycled? What can residents do to reduce the impact they are having on the environment?

To find the answers The Royal Gazette travelled with the trash truck crews to see what they have to face.

Roland Tear, a foreman with the Waste Management Department of Works and Engineering, provided a guided tour and the first stop was Darrell?s Wharf on Harbour Road.

?A couple of tourists waiting for the ferry studiously avoided looking at a large pile of rubbish bags, cardboard boxes and two discarded mattresses that surrounded a nearby phone box and partially filled the entrance to the car park.

This spot had been cleared up on Friday, but by Monday morning it again resembled an unofficial waste tip. One of the trash truck crews would deal with the mess by the end of the morning. Who was responsible for this pile of rubbish?

Mr. Tear said: ?Some has come from Darrell?s Island. Some of it has been left by boaters. Those mattresses shouldn?t be there. Whoever left them there should have called us and arranged for a pick up.?

What concerns Mr. Tear is the fact that some of the bags of rubbish have probably been lying out in the open for up to three days over the weekend, causing a smell and attracting pests.

It is a similar scenario at Jew?s Bay where the wharf has become an unofficial dumping place for bags of rubbish and a few discarded 12-volt engine batteries. If food items and pieces of fish are left in the bags the stench from being left uncollected for a few days can become overpowering.

The lesson here is to educate people to keep trash indoors until collection day. That is something that even householders and residents seem to have trouble with. As we patrol the streets we see evidence of rubbish bags left out the night before or even a day or two early providing easy pickings for birds, rats and other pests.

For the crews on the trash trucks a bag that has been attacked by starlings poking their beaks inside for scraps of food can quickly become compromised in the heat of day and literally fall apart the moment it is lifted by a trash collector ? sending rubbish tumbling across the ground.

A truck crew stops near South Shore. The driver Steve (Warrior) Franks praises the new state-of-the-art trash truck he is driving. It is fully kitted out, including an air-conditioned cab.

Asked if people are throwing out more trash now than in previous years, he replies: ?There are more houses being built and the population is increasing. We are seeing a lot more garbage being thrown out.?

His crew mate Herman Brown grabs a few bags by the roadside and tosses them into the crusher at the back of the truck.

His colleague Neville Tucker speaks of a problem with folks not washing out their bins. ?Sometimes they?ll put their trash out late and leave it there for the next collection and it attracts maggots and things and these are left in the bin and not cleaned out,? he said.

There are problems also when people throw trash out in brown grocery bags that tend to fall apart when wet. The truck crew move on. They empty some bus shelter trash bins as they head for the next residential area.

Mr. Tear investigates a few communal trash areas outside condominiums and schools. The increasing number of condos being built is adding to the workload for the trash truck teams.

Some condominiums have easy-to-empty dumpsters, others have a specially built storage room where residents throw their bags of rubbish and which have to be manhandled into the back of the trash truck by the crews.

Mr. Tear feels more should be done to encourage or cajole developers to install trash compactors at condos. He agrees this would probably incur a service cost to the residents of the condos, but as things stand the Government is picking up the bill for the increasing amount of time taken by W&E crews as they empty the communal rubbish areas.

Trash compactors normally only need to be removed once every two weeks to be emptied and are a secure way of holding rubbish out of reach of pests such as rats. Pulling into Paget Primary School, there is evidence some people have dumped larger items of household rubbish in the school?s trash dumpsters ? this is something Mr. Tear does not agree with.

The residents should make use of the call-and-collect service if they have items that cannot be carted away by the normal collection teams.

Trash trucks hold between four and five tonnes of waste before they need to be emptied at the Tynes Bay Waste Facility to be sorted and incinerated. The crews normally gather three or four truck loads per day. However, not all the waste is thrown away. Glass, tin and aluminium cans are recycled if they are left out in recycling bags.

The glass is used as landfill at the Airport, while the tin and aluminium is compacted and sent to New Jersey to be melted down and reused.

Karlos Burch, foreman of the current recycling facility, said there is a problem when people try to recycle items such as plastic, or when they contaminate recycling bags by putting food scraps in them or not cleaning out the tins and cans.

Amy Harvey, education officer for the Waste Management Department, said there is also recycling of hazardous waste such as oils, paints and batteries and a pilot scheme has started to gather old computers from business users and have then shipped to the US for recycling.

Last year 39 tons of aluminium, 117 tons of tin and 956 tons of glass were recycled in Bermuda.

A new, larger recycling plant is due to be opened at the Government?s quarry site off Harrington Sound in the early part of 2007.

A renewed awareness campaign to encourage residents to recycle is likely to begin then, once the capacity of the new plant has been established.

Ms Harvey said: ?We will do an big educational push. Bermuda has a mix of communities and some people have different habits and assumptions regarding recycling. As an example we get a lot of people trying to recycle plastic bottles which is something we can?t do here.?

Asked how residents can lessen the amount of trash they create, she said: ?Nowadays the items we buy at the shops often have triple or quadruple the amount of packaging as before.

?There is a lot of cardboard and plastic packaging. People should get in the habit of ?buying smart?, going for the alternative items that have less packaging.

?People need to think of the three Rs ? reduce, recycle, reuse. When people go shopping they should try not to take things if they don?t need them, like bags and straws and, if they are having a takeaway don?t take plastic forks and knives if you are going to take the food home to eat.?

She said it was also important for people to think before they throw something out, as it may be an item that can be used by someone else.

Back on the road Mr. Tear encapsulates his wishes as being an introduction of more trash compactors at condominiums, old peoples? homes and schools. He would also like for residents to put out their rubbish bags only on the day of collection and to freeze old scraps of food before they are thrown out to lessen the attraction of pests and birds as well as preventing nasty smells.

But for all the problems the trash truck teams encounter, Bermuda should still be proud of its relatively clean habits. Mr. Tear said: ?Despite all this Bermuda is still one of the cleanest places in the world.?