In my community, everyone contracts for their own garbage service independently. Don’t care to debate the issue of government sponsored trash pick-up, we’ve done that in the past. In my specific neighborhood, approx. 80% of the residents use the same garbage hauler, as our HOA negotiated a reduced rate if a certain % of residents used their service. Don’t care to debate the issue of HOA’s, we’ve done that in the past also.
I’m pretty sure that every household has some sort of contracted garbage pick-up. Every garbage collector will also pick up more garbage than the alloted cart full if it is bagged and placed at the curb along with your can, at no extra cost beyond your monthly bill. They will even pick up tree limbs if they are cut to at least 8 or 9 foot in length and bundled in a pile beside your cart at your curb. Pretty nice service.
Every year over memorial day weekend, our HOA arranges with the primary trash hauler that most of us contract with to put one of those large construction size dumpsters, about 30 feet in length, in a central location in the neighborhood, so that residents that are doing spring cleaning can discard some of those oversized items that wouldn’t neccesarily fit into their trash cart or not easily go into a trash bag. This service is covered under our HOA dues and any resident is free to put things in that dumpster over the weekend.
Invariably, before the weekend is over, the dumpster will be full of tree trimmings, branches, large garbage bags full of things…sure there is your odd assortment of large items that normally would need to be carted off to the dump, but the majority of the contents of this dumpster are things that the hauler would normally pick up at the curb on trash day.
I guess, it could from people that don’t live in the neighborhood, but I don’t think so. The location of the dumpster is deep within the neighborhood and not easily viewable from the main traffic areas. So why would people go to the trouble of loading tree limbs and bags of garbage into their cars or SUV’s and hauling them several blocks to the dumpster this one weekend, when they could just as easily drag them to the curb at their house and let the truck pick them up from their? Any rational ideas?
Maybe they have more than they would comfortably put curbside on an ordinary day; maybe they don’t know they CAN put them curbside on an ordinary day; maybe the advertisement that “Hey, this is for big stuff!” reminds them that, hey, they have big stuff! and they use the dumpster because they’ve been enticed to.
My question, in a similar vein, is why our HOA replaced half of our dumpsters with recycling dumpsters that are 1. Nearly always shut, and unless you’re 8 foot tall you simply cannot open the lid, much less hold it open while putting stuff in, and 2. When they ARE open, they are almost immediately filled…but only picked up every couple of weeks, and so useless until emptied. So, they are effectively useless at least 75 percent of the time. It’s…not working, whatever the plan was.
Taomist, you ought to find out when the next BOD meeting will be held and drag your ass in to complain, and/or send them a letter. Those are your dues that paid for those useless pieces of crap.
Omar, it’s possible that those additional trash items are in fact from people outside the community. If this is a regularly-scheduled event, they might learn “Hey! Free trash dumpsters at MeadowOaksBrookMaplesCreek** every Memorial weekend!” Especially if it’s construction debris, which contractors normally have to pay to remove.
** I don’t know where he lives in real life. But, c’mon, doesn’t nearly every HOA have at least one of those in their name?
As I said, that may be a possibility, but most of the contents are tree limbs, shrubbery trimmings, etc. and large plastic bags. It doesn’t appear to be construction waste. It appears to be the local residents hauling these things to the big dumpster, as they aren’t aware that they will be picked up anyway, or they are hauling a few oversized items to the dumpster, and while they are going, they’ll take their normal garbage along.
Are you sure *none *of the companies charge by how much trash is picked up? My former neighbors had a daughter who lived in a New Jersey town where they were charged by the bag. Whenever a car went from the daughter’s house in Jersey back to Queens it was filled with trash , since our taxes pay for pick up and there’s no limit. I would have thought it was just them being crazy, but I’ve known a number of other people who drove their trash to work for the same reason, and it’s apparently a big enough problem that the street wastebaskets have signs prohibiting their use for household trash.
Residents living there tell their friends to bring it on over. Perhaps those friends have to pay per-bag for trash pickup (like we do in my neighborhood).
I spend time carting my trash to a dumpster because I strenuously disagree with the per-unit payment model they use for trash in my village. Garbage should not be paid for like this! This shitty policy increases hoarding by the poor (who are already the most vulnerable to it), because trash disposal is more optional than clothing and food. I’d be happy with a per-household contract model–at least then there would be some competition, as opposed to now when the village charges us **$3.38 **per bag, which cannot be larger than 33 gallons or heavier than 60 pounds. But it’d be even better if trash pickup were included in property taxes, like the neighborhood I grew up in.