Talking trash

I would have loved the Children's Garbage Museum. Connecticut kids don't have to muck through a dirty and dangerous landfill. (The day I came home from Willie's reeking of the garbage pit where I'd fallen was my last visit.) They can come to this facility and see big trucks disgorging heaps of trash and watch as drivers use bulldozers and front-end loaders to push it around. There's not a rat in sight.

"It's our job to get the kids to nag," says Audrey Sciuto, museum educator. "We want them to go home and bug their parents until they get a recycling bin and start using it." If that means luring them with a big, noisy, messy, colorful trash spectacle, so be it.

The Garbage Museum is an outgrowth of the adjacent processing center that receives paper, plastics, and metals from curbside recycling programs in 20 southern Connecticut communities. The walkway on the museum's second floor overlooks dumping stations on one side, and processing and baling stations on the other. Neat blocks of pressed cans bound with steel wire await shipment to a metals center. Other bales contain plastic bags. Bales of paper are stacked 10 kids high.

Anne Larcheveque and Nina Gibson of nearby Bridgeport and their 3 1/2-year-old sons, Richard and Will, are frequent visitors. "They love the trucks," says Larcheveque, "all the types of trucks - and the garbage." (What little boy wouldn't?) "It's not just an activity for them. They learn a little." As she's speaking, a trash hauler backs into a bay, raises up the bed of his truck, and tips a load. Bottles and cans gush out and spill across the concrete floor like a trash tsunami. Watching from above, Richard and Will are ecstatic.

"We recycle stuff at home," Larcheveque says. "We tell the kids that the stuff that was picked up in front of our house ends up here. We play games - like looking for our orange juice container."