Most people don’t think much about their garbage men.

Unless you get stuck behind a truck when you’re in a hurry or your garbage doesn’t get picked up when you thought it would, for most folks, the garbage man is out of sight, out of mind.

But for Joey Harris, a local manager at Waste Management who sees garbage men at work every day, they are people who deserve the utmost appreciation and respect.

Working ten hours a day, doing heavy lifting outside in the Mississippi heat, is certainly not a feat everyone could accomplish. “To me,” Harris said, “they’re like world class athletes.”

In fact the work of a garbage man is so physically grueling that a lot of new hires only make it a couple of hours before having to be picked up and sent home, Harris said. The workers that do make it have to take it slow for the first few weeks just to get into good enough shape to do the job fully.

Most routes, Harris said, cover around 1,100 houses a day.

Picking up garbage and compost would be a hard and dirty job even if all residents disposed of their garbage properly, but garbage men also have to deal with huge limbs which haven’t been cut to size and can barely fit in a truck, piles of leaves large enough to fill a room, and even disgusting household garbage that is dumped loose, un-bagged on the side of the road.

According to Waste Management’s contract with the City of Meridian, residents are supposed to bag or can their household waste, cut limbs to a manageable size, and leave compost piles no larger than 2 cubic feet. But when they don’t do that, Harris said, Waste Management usually picks it up anyway. It may not be in the contract, but Harris said he and his garbage men take keeping the streets clean seriously.

“People just don’t realize how hard these guys work,” Harris said.

Harris said Meridian’s crew of sanitation workers take pride in their jobs, and get upset if someone says they don’t do it well. And it must show, because a J.D. Power and Associates survey of the three-state Waste Management district ranked Meridian at number 3 in customer satisfaction.

This may be partly because Waste Management does more in Meridian than just what they’re contracted to do. They try to stay involved in the community by doing things like donating cans and pick-up services to charities like L.O.V.E.’s Kitchen, participating in Relay for Life, and sponsoring Meridian’s Green Team.

While mistakes made by Waste Management are often well-publicized, Harris said their good deeds sometimes go unnoticed. For example, at a recent local cemetery clean-up, Waste Management hauled off debris at no charge. When the clean up was covered in the media, the person running the clean-up mentioned a long list of sponsors, but Waste Management was left out.

But, Harris said,”I’m not going to call them and tell them to mention it. That’s not why we do it.”

Still, he said bad press hurts the morale of the drivers and helpers on the route. “They take it personally,” he said, “because they take pride in what they do.”

Harris tries to show workers that they’re appreciated with cookouts and the like. “I don’t want them to feel like they’re a number,” he said. “I want them to feel like they’re a part of something.”

Harris said he understands that “if you work for the public, you’re not going to make everyone happy,” and feels that most Meridianites treat their garbage men well. Some even bake them cookies for Christmas, he said.

One of the most time consuming parts of the job is picking up compost, because, instead of throwing bags of trash into the truck, workers have to use rakes, brooms, and shovels to collect all variety of yard waste from the side of the road – no matter how fast the workers are, lifting heavy limbs and raking up large piles of pine straw just takes longer than emptying garbage cans.

Waste Management doesn’t require residents to bag compost in Meridian, but it’s strongly encouraged. Not only does it make the job much easier for the worker, it makes the route go by more quickly – and the faster it goes, the sooner Waste Management can get the compost out of your yard.

A part of the job that has dwindled in recent years is recycling. When the service was first offered in Meridian, it was popular, but now, Harris said, “we’re doing 1/3 if not 1/2 of what we used to do” in recycling.

He attributes the drop partly to less involvement from local schools, partly to Waste Management discontinuing the recycling of certain things, such a glass and cardboard, and partly to a loss of interest in a program which is no longer.

Since Meridian became an official “Green City,” Waste Management has been preparing to launch a new awareness campaign to promote recycling.