Oakland treats: Trade a bag of garbage for free ice cream

Not that you should need a reason to pick up garbage, but if you did, here is one: On June 3, if you collect enough trash from your neighborhood to fill a bag, a shop in Oakland will not only take it off your hands, they’ll give you free, delicious ice cream.

This somewhat odd swap is the brainchild of Bear Silber, who runs the MyGoodness ice-cream shop inside an Ethiopian cafe at 2834 Lakeshore Ave. by Lake Merritt. Their brand is “decadent soft serve” made from organic Sonoma County dairy, and presumably they’ll be dolloping out plenty of it that first Saturday in June – provided, of course, you pony up the garbage first.

“Anyone that brings in a bag of trash cleaned up from their neighborhood will be able to exchange it for a free ice cream,” Silber says. “Even as a relatively new addition to the Oakland ice cream scene, we’ve already garnered 5-star upon 5-star review on both Yelp and Google. Customers seem to love our new take on dessert, where we pair classic desserts directly with soft-serve ice cream all in one cup, with delicious flavors like Carrot Cake, Peach Cobbler and German Chocolate Cake.”

The limit is one free ice cream per customer, and bags and gloves are waiting for you at the shop right now. Silber has yet to respond as to what exactly he plans to do with all the trash people will be hauling in. Is he secretly an artist looking to build a terrible Burning Man sculpture? Does he run a clandestine export business shipping refuse to distant climes? Who knows. But if it leaves the streets looking just a little bit cleaner, more power to him and his little soft-serve shop.