Trash

Upper Merion Township supervisors have turned down all bids for trash hauling in the township, saying they need to write more specific guidelines for the services they want. Two attorneys for one bidder, J.P. Mascaro & Sons Inc., and a township resident pleaded with supervisors to delay their decision rather than reject the bids Monday night. Linda Gervasi of King of Prussia said she had only recently learned about the bidding process from a neighbor and heard that she would pay less for her garbage collection if any private hauler received the contract.

These are the times that try people's recycling theories. During the trash crisis brought on by the city workers' strike, the Philadelphia Clean Air Council has suggested ways to manage household trash: Substitute reusable products such as cloth, glass, metal or ceramic products for throw-away paper and plastic items; use personal shopping bags to avoid using plastic or paper bags; donate unwanted clothing and furniture to charity; and...

If it was just a case of a Council majority disagreeing with the mayor, fine - Council is not supposed to be a rubber stamp. Its members have an obligation to their constituents to vote according to their individual judgments, not on orders from the mayor or anyone else. But every time Council avoids acting on the Goode administration's trash- to-steam bill, the city's frightening refuse-collection crisis gets worse, and the day of terrible reckoning draws closer. There are fewer and fewer places to put our trash, and it's costing more and more to get rid of it in those fewer and fewer places.

"We dump the trash onto a concrete pad, run over it with the bulldozer, then push it down the chute so the trash can slide into the compactor. " That was Daniel Rubino of Malvern explaining to the East Whiteland Zoning Hearing Board how his firm, Chester Valley Transfer Co., used five acres in East Whiteland Township's "general industrial" district as a waste-disposal operation in the late 1970s and, subsequently, as a transfer station. His firm has since sold the business to his son, Danny, who operates it as 257 North Morehall Road Inc. of Malvern.

As the recipient of two state awards for its recycling program, the borough of Haddonfield has shown that you can convert trash into cash. The borough received a bonus grant award of $25,000 from the state office of recycling on April 18 for being the largest recycler per capita in Camden County in 1987, the most recent year for which statistics are available. "I feel Haddonfield deserves it because we earn it," said Leticia G. Colombi, commissioner of public works, who, with Mayor John J. "Jack" Tarditi Jr., accepted the award and check at an April 18 ceremony in Trenton.

Upper Merion Township wants to clear up confusion over its effort to solicit bids for a townshipwide garbage collector. The date of a public meeting to allow residents to ask questions and to allow the board to explain the bidding process will be announced early next week, Township Manager Ronald G. Wagenmann said. "I think there may be a lot of disinformation floating around, and I think the issue deserves better public explanation," Supervisor Justus C. Barber said during a board meeting Monday night.

The horromedy Tokyo Zombie is what Laurel and Hardy would make if they were still alive. And Japanese. And George Romero devotees. An absurdist social satire, Zombie is the inspired creation of first-time director Sakichi Sat?, who penned Ichi the Killer and Gozu, two of the most gourd-warping offerings by the Orson Welles of J-horror, Takashi Miike. Sato's film has an anarchist sensibility: It's a big, zombie-infested (but not-so-gory) vaudevillian survival tale and buddy film that savages Japan's new (un)

Nine-year-old Marco Bradley found a beer can shoved into a hole in a tree in Edison Woods near his Westmont home and didn't like that. He showed it to his mother, Mary Ann Bradley. The two of them pulled the can loose from the tree and took it to a large brown sack. Meanwhile his sister, 7-year-old Jo Nicole Bradley, wandered around picking up stray paper and twigs. The Bradleys were among 50 residents who, with rakes and shovels in hand, withstood the chill and rain Saturday and cleaned up the woods near their homes.

THIS FIRST Friday, Seraphin Gallery shows its visitors how one person's trash becomes another's art with Joan Wadleigh Curran's "Accumulation. " Paintings are made with gouache on black paper. The subjects are discarded and overlooked objects - a medley of trash from the streets of Philadelphia, rocks from a Wyoming quarry and ocean debris collected near Ballycastle, Ireland. By removing these materials from their environment and rearranging them in her studio, Curran explores the value of each piece.

Leap Day hath come. Legend holds that it's the moment when a gal can turn the tables and ask a guy for his hand in marriage without seeming brazen. Tradition also marks Feb. 29 as a propitious date for spiritual housecleaning. Now, I don't rate myself a merry widow, but I'm content enough. So I won't be getting down on arthritic knees to propose to an aged Prince Charming. On the other hand, I'll take full advantage of Leap Day's license to spiff up the rooms of my heart. I've found that cleansings of the spirit can come packaged in fancy weeklong retreats with a different daily herbal bath, but today, I'm going for the keep-it-simple-sister approach.