Trash Talk

The Christian Science Monitor has an interesting op-ed on garbage, specifically reducing the amount of it we throw away. Their stance is that when trash collection costs are hidden in tax bills, we tend not to think about how much we chuck out. When it's a matter of whatever is at the curb disappears on trash day, we don't pay attention to what we haul out to the end of the driveway on a weekly basis. Their solution: pay as you throw. Provide an economic incentive to not create so much solid waste by uncoupling trash pickup from the municipal tax bill and making people pay by the bag for pickup.

Not a bad idea, really. It works nicely here at the Rookery, where there is no municipal trash collection available, so all trash collection is handled by a robustly competitive group of private companies who have a vested financial interest in getting people to throw away less. The less people throw out, the more households the company can service on a single truckload, and the lower their expenses. To that end, they offer multiple tiers of service, and the more bags a household wants to throw out, the more they have to pay for trash service. We are on the 4-bags-per-week plan with our trash company, only because that is as low as they go. I rarely put out more than 2 bags. Because of this, my trash bill each month is less than the folks down the street who put out 3-4 overflowing cans each trash day.

Since I almost never use the full allotment of 4 bags, I would not say that my trash bill has been a big motivator to decrease my trash production (having grown up in the Pacific Northwest, I have eco-guilt to take care of that). However, if, instead of paying $11 per month for 4 bags a week, I could pay $5 for 2 bags, you can bet your sweet bippy I would find ways to not produce more than 2 bags of trash a week.

There is one tiny caveat to the pay-by-the-bag system. It encourages people to consolidate their trash into one larger bag. When I first got my trash service, I called them to clarify what exactly constituted a "bag," since with a big enough bag, anyone can cut down to one bag a week. Their answer was that as long as it weighed less than 50 pounds, they didn't have a size limit. The representative encouraged putting multiple 13-gallon kitchen trash bags and smaller bags from the other wastebaskets into one 33-gallon trash bag for collection. This leads to the slightly perverse scenario wherein I actually throw away more plastic bags than I would if they didn't have a bag number limit.