I haven't been on in a while, but now that y'all have dragged me back from my work, I've pulled another rainy-day issue from my list. Â How do you define "waste basket", "trash can", "trash bin", "garbage can" and whatever other terms you have for the same thing? Â How are they different, and how are they alike?
The only distinction that I keep more or less consistently is that "garbage" is usually biological (orange peels, sour milk, moldy bread, too-old chicken etc) and "trash" usually isn't. Â It may be that aside from that, all the differences in terms are merely regional. Â But I'm not convinced. Â How do you use these terms?
The last time I looked (the 1980s), the city code for Fort Wayne, Indiana distinguished between garbage and trash, and required regular removal of garbage from premises but in practice, they co-mingled waste streams.
A garbage can, to my mind, is 30 or 33 gallons, made of galvanized metal. If it's similarly large and made of HDPE, it's a trash can.
I never use the term trash bin. In UK stories, they talk of ash cans and ash bins. . We always carried ashes in a coal skuttle, spread  them immediately on the stone driveway. Â
I think I always had the notion (never having lived there) that the British "ash bin" was just a wastebasket, not literally reserved for ashes. Â I mean, probably it used to be for ashes, but not nowadays. Â Am I mistaken?
Bob Bridges said
I think I always had the notion (never having lived there) that the British "ash bin" was just a wastebasket, not literally reserved for ashes. Â I mean, probably it used to be for ashes, but not nowadays. Â Am I mistaken?
I had the same impression, else wouldn't have introduced them into the discussion, but I can't imagine a tall kitchen trash container being used for ashes. Â Add hot ashes to wastepaper, and you have a nice blaze. Â Add only ashes, and you'd need a forklift to empty it. Â Ashes weugh more than concrete!
I think that it was not until I left home for college that I (knowingly) encountered a distinction between trash and garbage. Trash can = garbage can. All the disposal receptacles in the house were waste baskets, but the organic material primarily went into the kitchen waste basket. After nearly half a century of making such distinctions, the old way sounds rather odd.
It occurs to me that through most of my childhood one of my chores was to "burn the papers" in the back yard, so there was some discrimination in which materials were disposed of where, but that orange peels, coffee grounds, egg shells, cans, and bottles occasionally went into the burn basket. Mostly illegal now, of course.