Minneapolis, MN, USA
wheeled carts at the alley. (The few houses without alleys have to drag them out to the street on trash days.) We have 3 carts now:
1 smaller (32 gallon) gray-black one for garbage (most people have a bigger one (94 gallon), I had it changed to a smaller one -back a few years ago. I pay something like $7/month less for the smaller garbage bin.) You can also put 1 or 2 extra bags or boxes of garbage there at no extra charge.
1 similar green cart (32 gallon) for organics/compostable. Everything in the card has to be compostable – you have to use paper or special (expensive) compostable plastic bags, for this. But not raked leaves or grass clippings. During summer & fall. they will take as many bags of grass clippings or leaves as you put out, but they have to be in compostable bags (paper or special plastics). I usually have only a tiny bit in this one. You can get a double-sized cart for an extra charge.
1 big (96 gallon) blue cart for recycling. All mixed together: paper, cardboard, glass, metal cans, recyclable plastic, etc. That one I do nearly fill up, sometimes overflow. (A big problem for the city is plastic bags people use to hold recycling – those get wrapped around the machinery that sorts the recyclables, and they have to stop the line every hour or so and send workers along to cut these bags off the machinery.)
These carts are supplied by the city, at no cost to houses, and stay with the address. They are lifted and dumped into the truck automatically by an hydralic mechanism. They replace the old system, where everyone supplied whatever they wanted for their own garbage containers. (The city was able to pay for all these carts with the money they saved on sick time & workers comp previously paid out to workers injured by lifting heavy garbage bins. They also reduced the crew on each truck from 3 people to 2 – a driver & a cart worker.)
Certain large items (like furniture, mattresses, appliances) can be left by the trash with a sign on them. The trash collectors will make note of this, and a special big-item truck will pick them up the next day. But items like construction/remodeling debris, tires,hHazardous waste, etc. aren’t accepted. Those you have to haul to one of 23 transfer stations in the city. Residents can get free coupons to do this up to 6 times a year, extra trips, or businesses have to pay for each load.
Garbage is collected once a week. Recycling used to be every 2 weeks, but I think they may do it every week now, since people are recycling more now. (You used to have to separate recycling into glass, metal cans, paper/cardboard – not many people did. With the single-stream for recycling, way more people are using it.)
If you do anything wrong (like excess garbage, trash in the recycling bin, etc.), the trash people have bright orange tags that they will put on your cart with notes about what you did wrong. They keep records for the address, and will send you letters if you keep doing things wrong.
The city bills for this monthly, on the same bill with water & sewer charges. The city government manages & bills for it, so there is only 1 set of garbage truck going through your alley. But the city hs many routes, and they put these out for bids every year or so. One of the bidders is the city’s own civil service garbage collectors. They have to bid against the others. Currently they do about half the city. Another bidder is a nationwide garbage corporation, the do about 20% and the remaining 30% is done by a private group of garbage haulers who own one or several trucks each. (Many of them were neighborhood independent haulers way back when each house had to pick a private company to pick up the garbage. (St. Paul, next door to us, still does it that way. The costs there are higher than those here in Minneapolis. Private enterprise – hah!))
The garbage gets hauled to a burner in downtown; the heat from the burning heats some downtown buildings. The organics goes to a city compost site; residents can go there to get compost for their own use. And the recycling goes to a recycling facility where it is sorted, packaged, and sold to refiners.