Why Your Trash Can Has a Smell, and How to Get Rid of It

Hardly anybody in Great Bend has ever cleaned their trash bin.

There's no obvious way to do it at home, nowhere good to do it, and you'd be washing dirty water down the driveway.

What's in there

Most of the smell is from what's stuck to the bottom of the bin from earlier weeks.

Trash bags often have small leaks, and you don't notice because the bag goes in the truck and the liquid stays in the bin. Over a summer you get a layer that airing the bin out won't fix.

Why Kansas makes it worse

Heat is the obvious one. A closed plastic bin on a driveway in July is hot enough that you smell it every time you open the lid.

In winter, there's condensation inside the bin with nowhere to go, so the mess at the bottom stays damp through the winter. Then the weather is warm again in spring.

What happens in a bin cleaning

With a garden hose, you only move things around and leave what's bonded to the plastic.

We rinse it, scrub the residue loose, and rinse it again under pressure. We use a sanitizing blend we mix ourselves and a pressure washer, and we kill 99.9% of the germs in the bin.

We collect the wash water and take it to a waste treatment site, so the only water left behind is a bit of overspray from the outside of the bin.

How often

We run it every three months, which is roughly how long a clean holds before it's worth doing again.

If you're on our trash pickup, we already do it. At the start of every quarter we clean your bin. It's on our schedule and included in the $27. The method is on the bin cleaning page, step by step.

We aren't taking standalone cleaning jobs at the moment. We've grown the pickup route faster than the wash setup, so we've paused one-time cleanings until we build a dedicated rig. Right now the only way to get one is to be a pickup customer.

Keeping the Smell Down Between Cleanings

Bag everything and tie the bag shut. Rinse out meat and fish packaging before it goes in, and keep the lid closed.

In summer, park the bin in the shade. Flatten boxes and squash milk jugs and drink containers so the bin holds more and you can close the bags properly.

Call (620) 314-8908 with any questions.