Opinion: Bulky item pickup is one of my favorite times of the year

By JIM BROOKS
Nelson County Gazette Editor

Friday, March 27, 2026 — This week and next, crews working for county government will wrap up this year’s bulky item pickup. And to me, the pickup is one of my favorite times of the year.

The pickup is one of the county’s best ideas that serves several purposes. It offers a way for people to dispose of large items without dumping them on a part of their own farm, down a sink hole, or at a random roadside dump. It also helps protect the environment and our groundwater by having a way to properly dispose — at no cost to the property owner — of hazardous materials like car and tractor batteries, tires, etc.

The pickup was launched by Nelson County Judge-Executive Mike Abel after Nelson Fiscal Court approved mandatory garbage collection in the county more than 30 years ago.

Now I’m guilty of slowing down in my car at times to check out what my neighbors have set out in their own pickup piles. And some years — this year included — its been fun to watch how our own pile of bulky item pickup junk changes from day-to-day without me lifting a finger!

Now my wife and I try to start identifying things to haul down our hill to the roadside every January. We started about the middle of January, and continued until the big snow. Once the snow melted, we continued adding to the pile.

But a funny thing happened which has happened in years past: The items we hauled down to the roadside began to disappear.

Two broken flat screen TVs — one of which had sat outside in the rain and actually “sloshed” when you picked it up — were there one day and gone the next. In fact, almost everything we set out this year eventually disappeared, going home with random passersby.

And then we had people stopping — not to take things from our pile, but to leave their own bulky items in our pile.

What kind of things, you ask?

We had a very beaten up and dented metal feed trough dropped off a few weeks ago. Being it was metal, it didn’t take long for someone to stop and haul it away.

From out of nowhere, three old automobile tires showed up one day. And on another day, several wooden pallets were dumped.

The pile of tires has been rearranged several times in recent weeks, though I’m not sure if people were seeing if there was any usable life in them, or if they were in the way of them leaving (or taking) something else in our pile.

A couple of days ago, a neighbor hauled a huge chest-type freezer in their tractor’s front-end loader over to our pile and dumped it. And again, being that it was a large hunk of metal, it was gone in a few hours.

A broken office chair we threw out spent about 4 hours in the pile before someone apparently needed it worse than I did. More power to them! Last year someone left a large tractor tire, but it too didn’t stay long.

In fact, as I look down the hill at what’s piled up for pickup, most of what’s there isn’t anything we set out. And frankly, I’m fine with that.

It shows that the truth in the old adage, “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” And truth be told, I come from a family of scroungers who aren’t above hauling home a broken chair or piece of furniture with plans to repair or repurpose the item. Repurpose, reuse, recycle as they say. And if those plans fall through, there’s always next year’s bulky item pickup.

Bulky item pickup has a long record of being a service that benefits the county residents and the county’s environment. And thanks to the members of fiscal court over the past three decades who have seen the wisdom of keeping the pickup part of the services offered by Nelson County government.

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