That’s a big part of my point. And where I am is pretty urban and many lots are very small. So it’s common to have to look at neighbors’ Piles of Shame beside their houses, and it really detracts from the neighborhood. I make a point to keep mine between the shed and the fence, but that isn’t an option for everyone.
Here we see graphically the collision between:
and
Even in a more public-spirited age, the average American’s ability to be anything other than selfish and shortsighted is just about zero.
Now? For a hefty fraction of society it’s less than zero and rapidly getting worse. Active vandalism FTW! 'Murricah! F*** Yeah! Freedumb!
Clearly, putting all the cost of consumer waste disposal on the consumer doesn’t work in our culture. If that externality is to be managed at all, it needs to be built into the supply side. And policed heavily to ensure they don’t simply industrialize the same cheating and illegal dumping and …
I literally live in the City of Boston and none of the restrictions you are complaining about are true for me. I can only guess you and your parents are in some suburb with stricter rules. Trash pick-up in Boston is pretty fucking great, actually. I leave stuff sticking up out of my bins all the time - no problem. I had a broken A/C I needed to have picked up; I just made a request on the app and gone the next day. I throw out old ratty clothes all the time, in bags of my choosing.
I don’t know where you live, but I don’t think it’s actually Boston.
I did say
Yes, and you also asked
So I answered you: No.
Here in rural-ish South Carolina, roadside trash is a huge problem. What pisses me off most about that is that we have transfer stations (“the dump”) all over the place and there are no stickers or permits required. They are open sensible hours, they are clean and mostly well staffed, and they take almost anything. I watched a couple of guys stuff an old sofa into a compacter once, an impressive sight! There’s good signage for metal, glass, electronics, cardboard etc. It’s really well run and yet people would rather dump their crap in a ditch and drive by it every day 
That’s how it still is here in my town. My private trash hauler won’t take bulky waste or electronic waste, but all I have to do is take it to the transfer station myself and pay a nominal fee. They actually take electronic waste and yard waste for free. The former gets recycled, and the latter gets turned into mulch.
I had the same comment when our transfer station first restricted their hours (they are now only onen two days a week), and then when they wanted to stop accepting cash because a [former] employee was pocketing some of the cash. To counter that they wanted to go cashless and only take credit cards or debit cards. (This was about 15 years ago when going cashless wasn’t quite as common.)
Anyway, I pointed out that the people inclined to haul their own trash to to the transfer station are more likely to be lower-income and often don’t have credit cards or debit cards—and if you make it too difficult for people to dispose of their trash then they will just dump it along the side of the road leaving the transfer station.
We had a guy who was pocketing cash. He was fired, but it’s still “cash or check only” at our transfer station. I’ll be on my way there in 5 minutes, after a stop at the ATM.
That’s pretty much how it works in Dallas too.
We get one trash can on wheels that the City issues us that’s about 100 gallons or so, and another one of the same size for recycling that’s blue.
They pick each up once a week. Once a month, we’ve got ‘bulk trash pickup’, where a large open bed semi truck and a smaller one with a hydraulic claw drive around and pick up people’s bulk trash. There are things they don’t pick up- tires, electronics, construction trash, chemicals/paint/freon, and hazardous materials). There’s a 10 cubic foot limit, and once a year, you can request up to 20 yards by appointment.
Those items have to be taken to one of the transfer stations around the city, where they their own dumpsters. Of course, if you have a bunch of crap you want to take in, they’re open a couple times a week- I think it’s Wednesday and Saturday near me, and take anything except hazardous materials and chemicals. They require proof of citizenship (in the City), meaning a DL with a city address, a water bill, or something like that.
Hazardous materials and chemicals have to be taken to the County’s location for disposal. I’m lucky in that it’s not far away, but it’s still a pain in the ass to have to lug some ancient paint cans over there on their schedule.
That’s pretty much the standard practice for single family homes around here in the several towns where I’m familiar with these details.
How quaint.
They come all the way to your house and pick up your garbage.
I should have it so good.
I propose that we implement a simple rule: you sell it, you take it back when the customer is done with it. Packaging too. All the way up the supply chain. Grocery stores can return cardboard and empty juice boxes to their distributors. They can work out a deal with their vendors to handle the recycling or pay for disposal, or keep sending it back up the chain. Every truckload can now return at least partially full instead of empty.
For most consumer goods this means every time you go to the store, you take back the trash from your last visit. Or the broken VCR, or whatever.
I can’t think of any other way to motivate manufacturers to incorporate far-sighted design into their products and packaging.
That would be a huge hassle, especially for us who regularly shop at a variety of grocery stores. Sort my garbage by store? I don’t wish to do that.
And, as others have pointed out, isn’t this a solution in search of a problem. Just charge homeowners a reasonable fee to pick up their garbage once a week. And have a transfer station within 20 miles or so to handle the overflow.
And give up the prospect of responsible lifecycle design of products, and continue to encourage ridiculous over-packaging.
Wow, I seem to live in a trash utopia. More on that later. First the dumb.
Up until last spring, everyone in my city who didn’t live in an HOA had to contract their own trash hauler. This meant 3-6 different trash companies coming through the neighborhood every week. The city claimed the trash trucks were the largest source of road damage on neighborhood streets.
At the time, I spent $32/month on trash and recycling pickup. Then the city decided to contract a single company to do all non-HOA trash and recycling pickup for $12/month. That’s a full Netflix worth of savings. The catch was that people were required to use the new trash service, or pay a $12/month opt out fee.
The noise people made, you’d think the city was coming for their guns. “Saving me $20/month is massive government overreach, and I will not stand for it!” type stuff for hours at city council meetings. Never heard any coherent argument other than “My trash, my rights!” for paying extra for trash.
The utopia bits:
- $12/month for 33 gallons of trash and 65 gallons of recycling
- I can put anything I want in the trash, excluding hazardous waste, some electronics, and refrigerant
- The recycling is pretty broad, including the hard plastics mentioned upthread
- The city sponsors a once per year free large item pickup and recycle day
- Just about anything you can haul to the curb can go (exclusions as above, though)
- The metal pickers make bank
- Free hazardous waste and electronics dropoff in conjunction with the large item day
- Year round free branch dropoff (and mulch pickup)
- New this summer, year round free yard waste dropoff
nm…
nm…
This. They could even be regional, reducing the cost to the communities.
I know I’m probably in the minority, but I was actually happier when I just took ALL my own damn trash (and other stuff) to the transfer station.
The one in NH even took used motor oil for free. Why? They heated the city barns, depots, etc. with waste oil heaters.
My parents’ town in Connecticut has a transfer station open to all residents. (I’ve even see candidates for town office standing there on Saturdays to greet voters.) Mostly the old-timers bring their trash there, while the newcomers on their street arrange for pickup by private companies. Everyone in town gets a 32 gallon wheeled bin for recycling and there is now a collection point for food waste at the transfer station. Because my parents’ diet is largely vegetarian with lots of fruit, there is more food waste by weight than regular trash. And the nice thing is the trash bin in the kitchen remains largely dry and odor-free.
I agree with this and agree that actual policy right now has to make things easy for householders so they dont do bad things with their rubbish.
I’m talking more about Costanza style ‘we live in a society’.
I dont think Japanese levels of social compliance are necessary, but the level is above that exhibited in Western liberal societies overall
In my city they sent out notices saying, for aesthetics, that trash cans were only allowed on the street between something like 6 pm the night before pick-up, and 8 pm the day of. And if we didn’t comply, they’d confiscate our trash cans. They abandoned those rules pretty quickly.