The smell is not the garbage. It's what the garbage left behind
Every bag that splits, sweats or leaks puts a small amount of organic residue on the interior walls and the floor of the bin. It dries there. The next bag adds to it. Over a year or two you have a permanent layer of the stuff baked onto surfaces you never look at.
That layer is food. Bacteria feed on it, and the by-product of that is the smell you get when you lift the lid.
Why a warm bin is so much worse
A trash bin in a Northern Virginia summer is a warm, damp, food-filled container sitting in the sun. That is close to ideal conditions for bacterial growth, which is why a bin that was tolerable in February becomes genuinely unpleasant in July without anything about your habits changing.
Why rinsing it out doesn't fix it
Hosing a bin out feels like it should work. Mostly it moves the problem around: the water loosens the top of the residue, redistributes it, and drains what it can onto your driveway. The layer that is actually producing the smell is bonded to the walls and the floor, and a garden hose has neither the pressure nor the contact time to lift it.
It also does nothing about the smell itself. Wet residue smells the same as dry residue.
What does work
- Clean the whole interior, not the visible part. The walls, the floor, the underside of the lid. The floor is the worst of it and the part a rinse never reaches.
- Deal with the odour separately. Cleaning removes the source; deodorising handles what is left in the plastic itself, which is porous and holds onto smell.
- Do the recycling bin too. Drained cans and sauce jars leave the same residue, and recycling bins go out less often, so it sits longer.
That is exactly the job Cox Bin Cleaning does — interior walls, floor, lid and outside, then deodorised, from $25 a bin.