Let's talk about waste disposal/recycling where you live...

My husband and his BFF drain their shop beer cans, count, stack in beer flats or bags and take back them in about twice a summer and get back enough cash to treat themselves to chicken or steak dinners. They have a lot of friends who like to drink out there too.

Now Iowa is proposing to do away with the can deposit. Which means instead of returning them to a store or recycling center for a few bucks we’ll just be throwing them in the garbage and the various garbage places will sift them out to be scrapped. Whether the price of beer or pop will go down has not been mentioned.

And we’ll probably be seeing more cans and bottles alongside the road like back in the 70s before redemption was around.

In my town (New Hampshire) we used to have a dump/landfill for rubbish. A permit for your vehicle was required. Recycling bins were available, but you weren’t required to use them. You could drive up and dump what you had over the edge.
Now it is a transfer station. The permit price was quadrupled, and we are required to by bags for the rubbish. Recycle bins for plastics/aluminum, glass (separated by color) and paper are all free, encouraging you to use them and keep recycling separate from the paid for rubbish bags. Other types of rubbish, electronics, building materials waste, large furniture, hazardous waste all handled for an additional fee.

I’m in rural western PA. We contract service through private trash haulers. There is no recycling. I have a dumpster at work, so I just bring garbage to work with me, since I pay the same amount regardless of how full my dumpster is.

Five or so years ago, the town I’m near began a recycling project. A huge container with different sections for glass, cans, cardboard, etc was placed in a vacant lot and hauled away periodically. Bars and restaurants used this to dispose of their beer bottles. The town felt the service was being abused and discontinued it. I tried taking our recycling to another town, but they required proof of residence. So, we do not recycle.

Yard waste - must be in large paper yard waste bags (self provided) or in a bin that has an X painted on it. Obviously the bin is left behind, but the paper bag yard waste is taken as a whole. No limit.

Recyclables - any thing paper, glass/bottles, plastic, cardboard, metal which goes in a county provided wheelie-bin. If you have more than the bin can handle, it can be left in paper bags atop the wheelie bin. Though you can get a second wheelie-bin at your own expense. No limit.

All else - regular self provided bins. No limit.

Everything is picked up on the same day once a week. Large items like furniture/mattresses will be taken but you need to inform the waste disposal folks in advance. (Maryland USA - halfway between Annapolis and Baltimore)

All utilities and services are owned by the city in my fair city, which is really nice. This gives me the opportunity for a small mini-rant, so I’ll start with how it used to work.

When I first moved here, in the late 1990s, garbage pickup occurred twice a week and recycling pickup was once every other week, two separate containers. One of the two garbage days, the men would go to wherever your can was kept and drag it out to the curb. Then the truck would come by, pick up the can and empty it. Then the dudes would come back and return your can to wherever you keep it. It was glorious. Best thing that ever happened to me. (Okay, I might be slightly exaggerating.)

Then I think the city wanted to encourage more recycling, so they reduced garbage pickup to once a week and increased recycling pickup to once every week. We had these split recycling bins so we had to sort paper on one side and glass and plastic and aluminum on the other side. But they stopped the driveway service. I was going to have to remember which day was trash day and drag my own damn bin out to the curb. Most weeks, I can barely hold it together for things like that. Luckily for me, the city was still going to offer the driveway pickup, but you had to apply and there’s a $25/month fee for that. I immediately signed myself up. You don’t have to be disabled or prove inability to drag the bins around yourself, just be willing to pay $25 a month. I am more than happy to pay that just to not have to worry about the garbage bins – especially if I’m out of town. You can be cited for leaving the bins out on the street for more than a few days. Now they have replaced our split bins and there’s just one big recycling bin with no divider inside so we don’t even have to sort anymore. Just dump it all in. Once a year, the city sends out a brochure to remind you when your scheduled pickup days are, as well as on which days they pick up bulk trash (big stuff, like appliances or furniture or construction debris or whatever) and on which days they’ll scoop up yard trash (leaves, grass clippings, fallen branches). There’s all kinds of instructions and specifications: what you can and cannot recycle, how big fallen branches have to be (6’ or less), which materials are considered hazmat and must be taken to specific locations at the dump yourself (electronics, old paint cans, mercury thermostats, etc.)

In fact, today was garbage day. All I have to worry about is getting it out of the house and into the bins and I know at some point (the recycling has already gone), some nice, hardworking fellas are going to turn up and take care of it.

How about a trip down garbage memory lane? When I was a kid, we didn’t haul our garbage cans to the curb once a week, we simply left the garage door open, and the garbage men (that’s what we called them) would come up the driveway, into our garage, grab the cans (no wheels in those days) and dump them into their truck and return the cans to the garage. Seems inconceivable in retrospect.

When I was a kid, the garbage men (that’s what we called them) walked back an alley to the back of our row home. They laid a sheet of burlap on the ground and dumped loose trash from our 55 gallon drums onto the burlap, then pulled up the corners and carried the sack to their truck, fluids leaking all over themselves.

Hard to believe it, but that’s how it was done in the 60s.

Portland, Oregon: Same as the OP, except there is a fourth container for glass. The paper recycling truck has a separate bin that the glass gets dumped into. The local UPS/Fedex centers reuse styrofoam peanuts. Block styrofoam can be taken to a central recycling business, as can electronics and other items. It’s actually against local law to chuck a TV in the landfill. The landfill trash is picked up every other week, compost and paper every week.

Rural Colorado Mountains here.

No trash service (pick-up) available unless you’re in town. That’s fine by me as it would be a pain to haul bear-proof containers up and down our driveway in the snow (or without snow for that matter). Just getting a garbage truck to our house in the winter would be a challenge anyway.

So, about every 3 weeks I take trash to a transfer station (big compacting dumpster). We pay by the bag. I just wish the place was open longer hours or more days. I have to plan around it.

I sort my own recycling, and take it in whenever. The recycle roll-off dumpsters are on the grounds/campus where I work (county government)

Same thing where I grew up in the Washington DC suburbs.

What a hard job.

This is pretty much how it is where I live. One green bin for regular trash, picked up weekly. One blue bin for recycling (paper, cardboard, glass, plastic), picked up every two weeks. Yard waste is also collected weekly, can go in an optional brown bin, or in paper yard waste bags. No plastic bags for yard waste, because it is all composted by the city.

The city just started their curbside recycling program a few years ago. Before that, you could either lug your recycling to the local Wal Mart, which had a recycling center, or contract with one of several local curbside recycling services.

We have 2 large wheeled bins, one for trash, the other for all recyclables except styrofoam. Both of those wheelies are picked up weekly, on the same day. The cost of that is covered in my city taxes. For styrofoam, larger items/quantities of recyclables and yard waste we have a city run recycling center about 3/4 mile from my house. City residents can use the recycling center at no charge. Yard waste is limited to one pickup or trailer load per day and no limbs over 3" in diameter. The only other restriction is no construction/DIY waste. That still has to go to a private landfill.

We have private trash collectors. Two bins – one for garbage, the other for recycling. It’s called single-stream recycling, so you don’t have to separate things (they do it). Before that, we had two recycling bins, one for paper, the other for glass and cans.

Houston, Texas suburbs here.

We have trash pickup on Wed and Saturday. That goes in whatever trashcans you have or bags and it’s any things you can fit. Saturday is big item pick up–basically anything not electronic–we left an old couch out and they took it. They provide a big wheelie bin that takes unsorted recyclables (glass, plastic, paper/cardboard) on the 1st and 3rd Tuesday.

Basically, as a two person household we end up with maybe a bag or two of trash a week and a full recycle bin at least once a month. We just got a composter, so the household trash should go down soon.

Part of my water bill pays for trash/recycling.
Trash goes into clear bags imprinted with the city name ~$3.25 a bag
I got a bin to put recycleables (separated by rigids and fibers [paper])
They are collecetd teh same day but by different trucks. there is also a site to drop off recycleables (they buy aluminum – not sure what else)
They used to take wierd plastics, but now it is just #1 and #2

Brian

Minor outlying parts of the Boston area (that’s in the Northeastern USA, for the furriners). I rent, so I don’t know where the charges are, but I’m pretty sure there’s a tax or fee for trash pickup somewhere.

Each residence (house or apartment) gets two city-supplied containers: a big black wheeled bin (trash) and a big blue wheeled bin (single-stream recycling: metal, glass, paper, cardboard, various plastics). If you generate more waste than will fit in the city bins, you can provide extras of your own. For yard waste, you can get a sticker to put on a self-provided bin, or use a self-provided paper bag made specifically for yard waste (no regular paper bags). All 3 types of waste are picked up by separate trucks.

All the bins go out on the sidewalk once a week. Big items like furniture go out on the curb with the bins; however, for TVs, computer monitors, large appliances, and a couple other special categories you need to call the Department of Public Works ahead of time and tell them you are putting one of those things out for pickup that week, because they can’t go in the regular garbage trucks.

Hazardous waste (paint cans, batteries, etc) have to be dropped off at one of the Department of Public Works collection sites.

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.

Taiwan here. You have to meet the garbage truck. Where we live, it comes around once a day at about 6:50 pm. If you were to work the evening shift you would be SOL. Other places have several different times. The trucks come everyday but Wednesday and some holidays. There is a recycling truck with takes various things on set days. For example, paper trash in taken on Mondays and Fridays. I used to work those evenings and was unable to get rid of a lot of heavy books that were no longer needed. They also collect food garbage which is provided to pig farmers.

In Japan, we had set days of the week to put out garbage in plastic bags. There were set days for different recycleables as well.

Neighborhoods would have set places and apartment buildings would often have a locations you can drop off the garbage.

Ravens are a huge problem in Japan and most places use nets to put over the garbage bags. The ravens are damn fast at finding bags which aren’t covered securely.

We have (paid by land taxes):

  • a weekly household rubbish pick up (140L bin),
  • a fortnightly recycling pick up (240L bin)
    +6 bulk rubbish pick ups per year (need to book online or by phone at least 2 days beforehand).

My parents who live in suburbia have the same as above + a fortnightly green waste (240L bin) for lawn clippings, branches, etc

There’s also places where you can drop off electronic goods to be disposed of safely (free of charge) and dumps for extra rubbish for an extra charge.

I’d forgotten the time-honored albeit illegal method: just take whatever to the dumpsters and leave it clearly visible. I’ve even seen things such as a fridge with a sign that said “works A-OK, redoing kitchen”.

Yesterday I took down my Roomba (6yo if I’m not mistaken, larger than my house warrants, still with the original box and manual) and picked up a new chair for my kitchen in a traditional style.