Let's talk trash.

I don't mean to get in anybody's face about this, but I think we could do a lot better job of taking out the trash.

I am a recent transplant to Atlanta, having arrived here from about as far away as you can get and still be in the continental United States. I was expecting big cultural changes when I pulled up stakes in Olympia, Wash., capital of the Evergreen State —- a state with an admittedly crunchy feel, where we store all of our outdoor toys near the door just in case it stops raining for a few hours.

I was leaving this land in the shadow of Mount Rainier for a flatter place —- one best known, by me at least, for its Olympic spirit, azaleas, masterful golf courses, shrimp and grits, pleasantly rainless winters and brutally hot summers.

I hadn't given a passing thought to any possible cultural divide over garbage, or, more specifically, how we collectively get the coffee grinds, thrown-out eggshells, empty plastic yogurt containers and other detritus of our day-to-day lives from the kitchen to the landfill, and places in between.

That's when I learned you never really know what's going to get in your craw until it's firmly lodged there. The day of awakening occurred not long after arriving here —- the day I took my first carefully sorted load of recyclables out to the driveway and found this forlorn-looking container the size of a breadbox, right next to the oversize 95-gallon garbage cart.

So this is it? This shoe box thingie is the way station for my recyclables? By the middle of that week, the wee container was filled to the brim, forcing me to either dump the excess recyclables into the giant maw of Herbie Curbie or haul them off to a distant recycling center.

"This shall not stand," I thought to myself. Why, in Olympia, recyclables have equal standing with garbage. Each category of waste gets its own stand-alone cart. In fact, the city's most recent waste-management plan is ambitiously dubbed "Toward Zero Waste."

A few weeks and a little research later, I was thrilled to learn that my newly adopted city was updating its waste-management plan, and, as part of that process, the mayor was eager to hear what citizens had to say about all garbage-related matters. At that night meeting, I was equally thrilled to learn that I was not alone, that at every previous town hall gathering on this issue, someone had gone to the white board to call attention to the need for bigger recycling bins.

In fact, most of America wants to recycle more. According to the Center for the American Dream, nearly nine out of 10 people said the nation "should be more focused on recycling and buying goods that are not over-packaged in order to protect the environment."

And the nation has made significant strides. As of 2002, more than 9,000 curbside recycling programs, serving half the nation's residents, were up and running, successfully diverting about 30 percent of our solid waste from landfills and incinerators.

But, as I suspected, the progress has been spotty, and not every municipality or state has been equally aggressive in reducing waste through recycling. Indeed, in a 1999 report dubbed "State of the Nation's Waste" by Zero Waste America, Washington state was deemed the best recycling state of them all, with 48 percent of its garbage getting recycled. Georgia did relatively well, too, at least percentagewise, finishing 10th, with a 33 percent recycle rate.

But as I have since learned, there is more than one way to rise and fall in the eyes of Zero Waste America. Even with their respectable recycling rates, Georgians, it turns out, generate a lot more garbage per capita than Washingtonians. When you net out the recycled material, the average Georgian generates 1.3 tons of garbage per year, compared with the more parsimonious Washington denizens, who send an average of 0.8 tons to landfills. That, in the complicated formula used by Zero Waste, results in both states dropping in the overall state rankings: Washington falls to 10th, Georgia to 43rd.

But Atlantans who want bigger recycling bins should not despair. An innovative pilot project is apparently in the works, slated to debut this summer, when as many as 10,000 homes will be rewarded for recycling more. They will get a 95-gallon recycling bin, complete with incentives to use it.

Take that, Olympia!

> Peter Menzies is a writer living in Atlanta.

 PAUL LACHINE / newsart.com