It's great that the city is implementing an islandwide curbside recycling program.

But ...

Where are you going to put those two extra bins?

Seriously, Daddy is going to have to give up some garage space or Mommy is going to lose her bed of green onions or sonny boy will have to sell that "project" car he has sitting next to the house because those 96-gallon 'droids have a wide footprint.

You can already see families around Hawai'i Kai and Mililani struggling to cram in the two bulky new additions to their households.

Very few people on O'ahu have expansive yards and long driveways. Many don't have any yards to speak of, and driveways are more like parking lanes where all the extra people who live in the one-family house keep their cars. Some houses have little hollow tile enclosures to store the one trash can when it's not out on the street.

Now that there are three big bins to contend with, the old space is too small and trash row takes up an entire parking space in the front of the house.

Three large trash cans in different colors don't do much for curb appeal, but also, in terms of the amount of terrain taken, that's a lot of expensive real estate to have to set aside. If the land value of O'ahu properties is somewhere around $80 to $95 per square foot, and the three cans take up, what, close to 3 square feet of space each?

That's a valuable buffer zone.

And what of the people who live up on steep hillsides who already have to maneuver a single wheeled trash can down the slope? Those rolling cans don't come with brakes, and if they're full, they're heavy and can work up a good clip on the way down.

If there's no room for them to live at the bottom of a steep driveway, somebody is going to end up extreme surfing them down the hill and lugging them back up.

In other cities, curbside recycling is confined to smallish stackable boxes, but that would necessitate a three-person pickup crew, one guy to drive and two guys to toss boxes. Those days are over.

The union fought automated trash pickup, but now that they're driving the slick truck with the mechanical arm that does all the heavy lifting, they're not going back to the old way without demands.

So make room at your place for your two new buddies. Maybe plant a nice hibiscus hedge they can hide behind when they're not doing curb duty. We'll look back on this in years to come and laugh about how clunky and cumbersome our system once was, but for now, we'll have to welcome those huge plastic buckets into our lives.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.