I’ve received an email from the town chairperson, notifying residents that rates charged for recycling may be going up by 53%. What’s to stop people from deciding that paying for recycling is too expensive, and just throwing recyclable materials into the trash?
Do you have dedicated bins for trash and recycling?
Here, the trash bin is way too small for trash and recycling.
Where I live, they claim that trash collectors will notice if you are putting too much recyclable material in your trash and you’ll get cited. The trash collectors don’t ever look. Even if they bothered to, what are they going to do, open up the trash bag in the can and sort through it?
Out where you are, they’ll probably just get more people burning their paper waste if they can opt out of recycling pickup. Are you even allowed to opt out? Here, you’re required to pay a garbage fee whether or not you use trash pickup, since the assumption is you’re utilizing dump services one way or another. And recycling is included in that fee/service.
No. Recycling is not mandatory. We recently moved from large, shared bins to bins for each household (and fines for depositing the “wrong” stuff). So it’s all garbage now.
The city of Seattle is the only place that has quasi-mandatory recycling. You can be fined if a certain amount of stuff in your trash is considered recyclable. It is even to the point you can be fined if compostables are found in your trash. A co-worker of mine has been dinged a couple of times on the compostables.
I can’t even imagine how they check. My garbageman doesn’t even glance inside if I tie the bag closed.
Where my son lives in Redmond, you are charged for the number of garbage containers you put out, while recycling is free. You are supposed to sort the recyclables into compostables, paper, and metal/glass. How closely the control this I don’t know.
Here in the Montreal suburb I live in, the recyclables (one for paper/glass/metal, one for garden waste) are collected from municipally supplied containers that can be emptied by the driver without leaving the truck and they have no way of knowing what you have put in them. Eventually, they hope to collect compostables aside from garden waste and I wouldn’t at all be surprised if eventually the ordinary garbage is also collected from such bins.
racer72 is correct regarding recycling. Recycling is free, compostable materials (and this means anything that will breakdown including meat/dairy/take out containers) are pretty cheap, and garbage is the most expensive by far. If you have more than 10% material in the wrong bin, you will get fined. But structured the way that it is, they make it worthwhile to recycle and compost by effectively taxing the garbage itself. By volume and counting only waste from inside the house (excluding yard waste), we are now at 1 unit of garbage : 1 units of compostable material : 5 units of recycling. The finished compost is then sold back to the many area gardeners quite cheaply to further subsidize the operation.
The system really seems to be working well in discussions with neighbors, etc. The one sticking point is the mandatory composting of food waste which some people find gross, but even the elementary schools are doing it now so hopefully that mentality will trickle back home.
The sticking point is a big deal in an urban area. Composting meat is another word for rat food. If a municipality levied fines for this I would install a garbage disposal. I already compost my yard waste with a lawnmower as do most people in my area so there is no way to build a decent compost pile with kitchen material. It’s simply not practical.
In Cleveland, local Big Brother fines you $100 via use of Radio Frequency Identification tags on your recycling bins.
And if anyone is gonna quote that article and tell us what a wonderful idea it is, please first tell us why most localities do not require news stands, convenience stores, restaurants and other retailers to recycle unsold newspapers and empty liquor/wine bottles.
I’m not sure I follow you. Disheavel was talking about the municipal rules in Seattle, which don’t require you to keep a compost pile, but rather to separate your compostables for collection by the city. Also, this is not even universally true in Seattle, as most multi-family buildings (read: apartments and condos) don’t have compost collection.
I doubt that’s going to be received well. I suspect there will be in increase in trash on the side of the road or people stuffing their neighbor’s receptacle. People are generally receptive to recycling but not a recycling big brother.
I’m miffed that my city has regressed to restricting plastic to # 1 and 7 and only picks up on alternate weeks.
So how does one separate chicken bones and misc meat? They would have to provide a compostable bag to hold it until it’s picked up.
I believe most people buy compostable bags. I’m not sure why you would think “they” (I’m presuming you mean the city here) have to provide one. Do “they” provide regular garbage bags?
Is anyone really requiring composting meat? Even Disheavel’s “including meat/dairy/take out containers” I took to mean “meat containers, dairy containers and take-out containers”.
Because it’s “their” policy and reeks of anal retentiveness.
Having to comply with legally enacted policies at your own expense is hardly unprecedented. For example, I need to make sure my garbage is collected and disposed of in certain prescribed ways, rather than just leaving it in the street. I need to collect and dispose of my (hypothetical) dog’s waste, rather than leaving it on sidewalks. I need to keep my (hypothetical) grass trimmed well enough that meter readers can come to my property and read my water and electric meters. The city does not provide me with free garbage bags/collection, pooper scoopers, or lawn-mowers. As to whether it’s anal-retentive or not - you may be able to scare up an interesting debate in GD, if you’re interested…
Not interested in debating it but you asked a question. My city provides me with their garbage receptacle and their recycling receptacle. Garbage in one, recycling in the other. There is no separation of recycling material and I wouldn’t want scavengeable material in a open container.
A friend of mine in Seattle (who isn’t directly in sanitation, but is an engineer in a vaguely related industry) told me once that the mandatory composting in Seattle has something to do with the use of (as I understand it) very tightly compacted and sealed landfills that are less likely to leak and allow the land to be brought into other uses more quickly. This is very important since the geography and the wet climate means that good landfill sites are sparse and expensive. But one side effect of this is that they are extra sensitive to having a lot of organic material in them, which can cause subsidence and the production of large amounts of methane. So it’s not just creeping eco-authoritarianism (or whatever you want to call it) on the part of the city government-- there really is a legitimate reason for Seattle to be more concerned about compostables than other cities.
The city provides a heavy-lidded wheeled container in varying sizes. Meat and dairy are fine in them, as well as yard vegetation and food-soiled paper products. It’s picked up every week. If you have meat to compost that you fear will stink before the end of the week, you can always keep it in the freezer until pickup day.