Quantifiable Living: Levels of trash

How it works: In a similar vein to the "Levels of Cleanliness" scale, the levels of trash scale indicates how gross a unit (bag, dumpsterload, heap) of trash is.

Unlike the "levels of cleanliness," the levels of trash uses a word-ranking scale rather than a number-ranking scale. This is the most efficient method for indicating all factors involved in determining a unit of trash's "grossness," which include sliminess, leakiness, smell and innate human revulsion (that is, the amount of natural disgust one feels at the trash's contents).

The appropriate words for describing trash will be listed from least to most offensive, with descriptions of sliminess (S), leakiness (L), smell (Sm) and innate human revulsion (IHR) to follow.


Rubbish: may be kept in a "bin"; may include such items as brightly colored candy wrappers or cake boxes; (S) contains no slimy items, (L) no leaky items, and therefore (Sm) does not smell and (IHR) does not provoke revulsion.


Paper waste: may be kept in a "waste basket"; may include all manner of papers; (S) contains no slimy items, (L) no leaky items, and therefore (Sm) does not smell; however, "paper waste" may contain distasteful photos of oneself or others, or evidence of fraud or embezzlement, each of which promote (IHR) and increase overall disgust.


Trash: must be kept in a "bag," which may be kept in a "container"; may include any item discarded by an individual or household, such as old broken toys and electronic equipment, clothes, leftover food from the fridge, and all paper waste and rubbish; on average, (S) will include old coffee grounds and perhaps a banana peel, (L) an old juice box drink and possibly leftover moldy meatloaf discarded still in its container, which will cause it to smell (Sm) approximately as bad as one's breath the morning after eating onions with dinner or a skunk spray from a mile away, all of which will increase revulsion (IHR) to the point of curling one's lip when asked to take the bag out.


Garbage: typically kept in a "bag," which may be kept in a "can" or "dumpster"; may include all manner of trash, with additional spoiled and leftover food contents such as chicken bones and innards, moldy yogurt three weeks past its expiration date, old tea bags, and failed stew experiments; on average, (S) will include items that ooze and cause one to immediately wash one's hands after contact, (L) will be barely contained by the bag and pool visibly at the bottom, causing one to run the bag to the curb "before it explodes," (Sm) will smell as bad as one's breath the morning after eating Doritos for dinner, or a dead skunk in the middle of the street in front of one's home. The revulsion (IHR) provoked by the sight of this discarded material will cause one to wince in physical pain.


Refuse: may be kept in a "can," "dumpster," or "container"; may include all garbage contents with the additional content of human bodily material such as vomit or items used to clean up vomit; (Sm) will smell as bad as one's breath the morning after bathing in garlic-parmesan sauce, or a dead squirrel slowly decaying in one's car engine. The innate human revulsion (IRH) in encountering these levels of slime, leakiness and smell will cause one to almost, but not quite, add to the waste content of the container.


Industrial-grade waste materials: must be kept in an industrial "drum," specialized "dumpster," "landfill" or "secret toxic waste dumpsite"; may include all manner of radioactive material, or, on the other end of the spectrum, all manner of animal offal, bones, parts and blood; (S) will cover part or all of one's body at some point in the disposal process; (L) will certainly leak, possibly in toxic quantities; (Sm) will cause one to physically lose the sense of smell, or else pass out, or both; will cause long-term madness in individuals with prolonged contact with the materials and blackouts in individuals with momentary contact. Repressed memories of such contact will resurface throughout one's life.



Elaborations: Special circumstances may also require the use of a word for discarded materials, from rubbish to refuse, that are not properly contained in garbage containers. There is a particular word for uncontained trash, which may or may not be repulsive ("litter"), described below.

Because seeing trash on the street increases IHR unnaturally, without increasing sliminess, leakiness or smelliness, the best way to measure litter's level of trash is to deposit it in an appropriate receptacle and then use the normal scale for levels of trash.

For your convenience, here is an addendum definition of "litter."

Litter: free-floating discarded items, ranging from receipts and musical theater ticket stubs to banana peels and dead scavenger animals (rats, pigeons). To be properly ranked, litter items must be placed in an appropriate trash receptacle.