Around here (Boston area) the cities and towns just keep putting more restrictions on trash. You get one approved barrel. Have to put it in sanctioned bags that cost $2 ea. You can’t put out anything that doesn’t fit in said barrel, so good luck finding anything to do with that half a fence panel you have left over. Seems like everyone I know, even those who maintain meticulous lawns, have a secret pile of shame somewhere. It’s illegal to put any textiles in the trash. These don’t all apply for all towns, just some of the examples I know.
Well, in my parent’s town, they will only take “hard plastic” twice a year. So that broken Playskool thingie or cracked lawn chair? Just hang on to it for six months.
Well, you know all those concerns about microplastics? I stopped by my folks’ house the other day and my 82 year old father was using a sawzall to cut a broken lawn chair into pieces small enough to fit in a trash bag. Plastic dust was everywhere. You think he’s the only one?
I did think about saying something to him, but at 82 he’d probably look at me like I was nuts.
I have a friend who did some remodeling and had quite a bit of moldings left over, some fresh, primed off cuts and some the old painted stuff that almost certainly had lead paint. The construction debris place had a one ton minimum. So guess where it all went? Into the little fire pit in the back yard.
Just wanted to vent. Feel free to comment or share. Is it like this everywhere, or is it a Boston thing?
Yeah - I get some of what you say. And some of the limitations you cite are nuts. No textiles? And you have to pay $2 a piece per bag for just regular garbage?
But, OTOH, I’m consistently amazed at the amount of garbage many of my neighbors generate week after week. I personally think charging a modestly hefty price for oversized items is appropriate. People amass and dispose of too much stuff.
We don’t have that restriction against hard plastics. But we do have a free bulk pickup every srping (or every other.) I’m shocked at the crap folk haul to the curb, that they’ve been hanging onto for a year, instead of putting a sticker on it and getting rid of it.
At the time I bought my house, the city charged us by the can, the mechanism was trash stickers that we had to buy either from city hall or a handful of local vendors. There were some general annoyances but it seemed like a good way to discourage waste and connect service fees to actual use.
At first I liked it. Then it became a game of, how much can we let the trash build up in our can before I slap a sticker on it and drag my OSHA violation the the curb.
A quick drive around the neighborhood on trash day would reveal that it did nothing to reduce consumption. Eventually they ditched the policy and I don’t think there were any objections.
(I question whether the policy ever had anything to do with reducing waste. I think it was more the sentiment “why should I pay for my neighbor’s trash volume, I’m old and retired and only put out half a can every other week.”)
It seems from what you are saying that “fits in” means you have to be able to completely close the cover? That isn’t even the worst of their rules! I’d say this is a joke, but I know you aren’t kidding.
Streets & Sanitation here in Chicago takes anything, especially if the guys like you. Just last week, I put a number of heavy flat rocks in my barrels because I redesigned the border surrounding the edge of my back yard. No problem. Discarded broken chairs, desks, etc? If you can squeeze them in the barrels, the tops can be completely open, and it is not a problem.
The city, generally speaking, should provide pick-up days for people to get rid of their electronic waste, hazardous materials, old furniture, recyclables, etc., so that people do not have to seek “creative” solutions. At the same time they should pursue policies that encourage reduction of generated waste, and of course fine the bejeezus out of flagrant violators of environmental regulations.
On this note, I’ve gone through the ups and downs of the 90s concern about “landfills are filling up, we’re all doomed!” to the 00s reality of “actually we have lots of space for landfills, this isn’t a big deal”, to my current position of “why do we let corporations make money producing trash.” I think that externality needs to be baked into the product to discourage consumption, as opposed to blaming consumers for consuming. 99% of all McDonald’s toys are a few days or weeks or months from being trash, every fisher price playset is a few years away from being a liability for the parents, every single use plastic Starbucks cup is an atrocity. Start charging those companies for the problem and maybe they’ll change their business model for the betterment of society.
Lid must be completely closed. And the barrels are tiny.
In my town you must use the approved barrels. You may buy a sticker for the barrel, $75, and they’ll take whatever is in it, but it must be bagged and lid shut. Alternatively, you can buy “Blue Bags” at various businesses around town for $2 each. Recycling is unlimited- so I have a Rubbermaid barrel with a recycling sticker on it. Interestingly, the recycling isn’t examined so one could dispose of certain trash contraband that way and almost certainly get away with it. I wouldn’t know, of course.
And I really do have half a fence panel behind my shed that’s been there for 5 years. I should probably cut that up and hide it in recycling.
I live in a senior park. We are all given 3 cans, which are all the same size, large and heavy, especially for older people. I hate them.
One is for trash, including green waste.
One is for cardboard.
One is for food.
The one for food is the worst. I stopped using it. It has to be in special bags, which fall apart in the excessive heat we have here. It fills up about 3 inches of this huge container then stinks to high heaven.
Yeah, every Milwaukee tool I’ve ever bought is in a plastic bag inside the cardboard box, and I have no idea why they feel that bag is necessary. Makes me a bit crazy.
Apologies, but I do not understand. Do you buy the approved barrel or is it supplied? ANd you pay $75 how often? For a sticker you affix to the barrel?
I remember reading quite a while back that some space somewhere, maybe 50 miles by 50 miles, would be sufficient landfill space for the foreseeable future. And I regularly golf and recreate on old landfills, so that isn’t necessarily an insurmountable problem. The main cost is transportation of the trash.
So, yes, IMO it should be more costly to produce and purchase disposable material/products. But heck, that’s a “tomorrow” problem! Ain’t capitalism grand?!
Yeah agreed with this. Also, people generally need to be more willing to suffer inconvenience in aid of communally beneficial behaviour like separating rubbish types into a reasonable number of sub-groups, say six, seven as in Japan. We have much to learn from them.
But it isn’t just going to happen, its hard to change long standing attitudes.
The barrel is provided. If you buy the blue bags, their purchase price is what pays for the trash (and not, apparently, my $10k/year in property taxes) and those go in the supplied barrels. I didn’t mention, but there is a kitchen size bag for $1 and a larger (think black hefty bag size) for $2. So if you could get by on one kitchen bag/week, you’d save vs. the sticker.
Alternatively, you can pay $75/year for a sticker that applies to the barrel, and then you can use regular bags.
And FWIW, the quality of the bags is horrendous. They split very easily, which just feels like an insult.
In my neighborhood here, there is kust literally a dumpster and we can put anything in that fits, and the trash is taken for “free,” coming out of the rent, same as our water. We have to walk a block or so to take out the trash (or drop it off via car on the way), as we can’t just set it out, but I like it.
With just the 2 of us, we could easily get away with the smaller one, but the price diffrential is so small, we use the medium just for 1-2 heavy trash days a year. Many folk regularly have the large ones overflowing each week.
We also have a 65 gal recycling container - no charge. Garbage stickers for stuff larger than the barrel are $4. Big items might require 2 stickers. Yardwaste stickers are $2, but 2 small bundles of sticks (not bags of leaves) are allowed weekly.
So your $75/year sticker sorta sounds like a deal to me.
On edit - boy, I used to be able to link nicely. LOVE IT when tech things change!
This is one downside to trash services being paid for by the municipality using your taxes. The municipality pays the trash hauler, so they get to decide what will get taken or not.
My rural town here in Connecticut does not pay for trash removal. I instead have to haul it myself to the town transfer station or pay a private trash hauler. The private company also gives me a barrel for trash and another for recycling, but they are pretty liberal in what they will take. And if anything is too large I throw it in my trailer and take it to the transfer station myself.
Connecticut is actually pretty short on landfill space, so most of our trash gets incinerated in a waste-to-energy plant. The residual ash goes to a double-lined ash landfill (which I inspected the construction of years ago).
That’s almost certainly the reason for the charges for the sticker/bags. There are all sorts of trash pick-up fees in the area around NYC, everything from paying for official bags to residents needing to hire a private sanitation service or hauling it to the dump themselves and paying a fee. How do I know this? Because of the variety of ways I’ve heard about people getting rid of their trash without paying. I used to have a neighbor who came back with a car full of trash every time he visited his daughter. Her husband paid for one bag of trash a week and the neighbors drove the rest back, because our pick-up was paid for by taxes and four or five or ten extra bags didn’t cost anything. I knew other people who commuted in for work and would dump their trash in their employer’s dumpster or street corner/gas station trash cans.
We’ve been recycling for years and I have to separate trash, plastic, glass, metal/paper and compost. The latest issue is the official cans - when I was a kid, those metal cans like Oscar the Grouch lives in were required. Then there was a sanitation strike and bags were allowed and for 50 or so years that’s probably what most people used. (wonder why there are problems with rats and dogs and racoons? ) Now, a year or two ago the law changed and starting this year, a bin with a lid was required. Next year an official bin with a lid is required. One or two years notice to buy a bin that costs around $50 and people complained, so now they are providing one free bin. There are certain items (like computers) that have to be brought somewhere ( to a store that accepts them or an e-cycling event or a special waste drop off site) and can’t be put in the trash. There’s a limit on how much constuction debris I can put out with the trash ( six bags, I think) but that’s because if I hire someone to do work on my house , they are supposed to deal with the trash.
But I’m wondering about your town - if you can’t put textiles in the trash what are you supposed to do with them? What are you supposed to do with items that don’t fit in the barrel? I mean, we have a lot of rules and not everything can get picked up from the front of my house but there is a way to dispose of everything without buring it in the backyard or waiting six months.
It’s a hassle if there’s also no big trash pick-up periodically. Do you have a waste management facility (aka, dump with sorting)? Where I used to live, there was a senior discount and another if part of your load was recycling. Where I am now, it’s $10 for up to 200# of trash or recycling. I only bring large or excess recycling unless I have something like a dead small appliance (goes in a specific bin there), a mattress, or construction debris (again, it can be separated). I realize this requires a vehicle, but when I’ve had a lot of stuff to discard, I’ve split the cost of an in-town rental truck with someone in the same situation. Toxics go to a different facility and it’s free.
That one’s actually a state law. That everyone ignores. You’re apparently supposed to take your worn out underwear to some kind of recycling facility. It. Is. Dumb.
That’s how it was when I lived in NH, and I would happily trade a transfer station for outsourced pickup. Where I lived they’d take anything for free that had scrap value, and unlike here, something that had a fee didn’t require getting on some list weeks in advance. Just show up with the TV and give the nice man $3. Likewise construction waste- get on the scale, throw it in the pile, back to the scale, that will be 7 cents a pound, please.
One of the unintended consequences of making it harder for people to dispose of things is that they end up dumping it where it doesn’t belong. For example, if getting rid of an old couch means hauling it to the dump during the three hours a month they’re open, waiting in line and paying a fee, some people are just going to toss on the side of the road somewhere.
The same goes for yard waste or e-waste or bulky stuff or really anything that can’t go in your regular garbage. It gets tossed on the side of the road, in a field, in front of some random person’s house (for which THAT person can and will get fined) or thrown in a business’ dumpster (for which they’ll have to pay a steep fee to get it emptied off schedule).
In short, people need to get rid of their garbage and the harder a city makes it to do that, the more people will do it illegally.
Also, another unintended consequence of making it harder to get rid of garbage is that it becomes a fire hazard. Both because it can be a fuel source as well as making it harder for you to get out or fire fighters to get in.
