Is your trash picked up by the city? By a private company? Do you pay for this service directly or is it in your taxes? Do you yourself take your trash to the dump?
In my town, we have curbside trash and recycling pickup. There is no fee for recycling, but the trash people will only pick up trash that is in specific orange trash bags sold by the city for $1 each. When you have to pay for each bag of trash, you find you recycle a lot more.
So what is your local trash system and how do you pay for it?
I live in a condominium, and the condo board pays for trash pickup out of the owners’ monthly maintenance fees. There’s a dumpster and recycling bins in the parking lot behind the buildings. It’s all handled by a private company.
No direct cost. Disposal gets paid for through local taxes.
We have no pickup and taking it to the “recycling center” costs nothing for county residents. The recycling center currently consists of one big general trash dumpster, one for cardboard, and another that can accept paper, plastic, and glass.
Private service paid for directly by me. It’s about $75 a quarter year.
When I moved in, I thought the trash was included in the water bill since I pay it to the local association. And every week I’d bring my trash to the curb and every week it would go away. This went on for six years before I got a sticker on my trash one day saying I needed a valid account with them. Sure enough, I’d been getting my trash collected for free for six years before anyone noticed.
Before I moved, it was part of my monthly utility bill, and it got picked up at the curb. Now I live in a trailer park, and it’s part of the rent. We have a community dumpster that gets emptied twice a month.
Paid for via Council Tax (a per property tax) to the local district (in the UK). It’s about £1300/year, but that covers a range of services not just waste.
Private company. We mail them a check and they pick up whatever we put out. Not terribly efficient, but with 3-4 companies competing, we get good service cheap.
No, not really; it’s included in the property taxes and picked up weekly, along with alternating biweekly pickup of paper and cardboard, then plastic/metal/glass.
However a green bin program recently was introduced to divert organics from the landfill, AKA dump. Next year we will be getting weekly green bin pick up, but only biweekly garbage pickup. I’m going to need to post a calendar in my garage to keep up with it all.
We pay for it as part of our monthly services bill from the city. Water, storm drainage, lawn & garden waste, recycling, street sweeping and garbage = $84/month.
I get a yearly bill I think. It’s like $40 and it includes one recycling bin. Our trash is picked up at the curb every Wednesday. You can put whatever you want out there in whatever containers you want and they’ll take it away. I often find myself having to throw stuff away for my brother, who lives in a condo, and has weird trash rules.
Everyone has to pay the extra money for the recycling bin but you don’t have to use it.
Our municipality doesn’t pick it up, so everyone has to contract with a private hauler. We get one pickup a week and we pay over $100/quarter for it. Two years ago it was $84 for the same quarter, so they’re squeezing us just like everyone else.
They will only pick up whatever fits in the large rolling bin that we had to buy. The driver operates an arm that picks up the bin and dumps it into the top of the truck. They don’t pick up lawn bags or anything that doesn’t fit into the bin- old appliances, couches, construction debris, etc. Those we have to haul to the dump ourselves, for an additional charge, of course.
Picked up by a city contract with Waste Management. We pay monthly. This being Portland, we have four separate trash receptacles: non-food garbage (picked up every two weeks), compost (food and yard debris), recycling, and glass.
We have a blue trash bin and a green recycling bin provided by the city. They are picked up once a week and paid by property taxes.
Twice per year they have a bulk pickup where you can place large/bulky items in the street in front of your house and they come along to scoop it up and haul it away.
We can also take stuff to the dump ourselves if we have a truck or trailer and pay $5 per load of household trash, or $3 per load of green waste (tree limbs, grass, etc).
When we moved here 7 years ago, I called to find out about trash collection. It’s handled by private companies, and none of them collect recycling. If I remember correctly, it was something like $30 per month for one pickup a week. We don’t generate a full can a week, so that seemed a bit steep.
But about 6 miles from our house, there’s a convenience center where we can take our trash, our recycling, used motor oil, used antifreeze, used cooking grease, and there’s also a collection bin for clothing. And it’s free. So every 2 or 3 weeks, I’ll load up the truck and go over there. It got even easier when they went to single stream recycling - no more separating paper from plastics and metals.
On the rare occasions that we have construction debris or extremely big stuff to get rid of, we take it to the landfill - costs $10. I bet we haven’t done that 20 times in the last 7 years.
Recycling is included in the taxes. I live outside the city limits, so my option for garbage is to pay a company a monthly fee for the right to buy their trash tags. Because of this, I do what kayaker does and take it to my business and toss in the dumpster there.
Picked up by the city and paid for through municipal taxes. We are renters so I don’t know the breakdown of what it allegedly costs the city. There is no bag limit. We have regular garbage pickup twice a week - Tues and Fri evenings - and recycling pickup once a week (Monday mornings).
I love evening pickup, because it means we don’t have to remember to put it out early before work, nor do we deal with torn bags from things left overnight that the local critters have gotten into.
The city is trying to implement a composting program. I’m willing to consider it, if it can be done relatively stench-free in the walk-up apartments where we live.
Current place: there’s a dumpster for the complex, emptied once a week. So it’s included in my rent (but not broken out, so I don’t know how much it is).
My previous place - I moved July 1 - it operated under aPay As You Throwprogram, so I had to buy special trash bags and - trash not in those bags wouldn’t be picked up on trash day.
