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How to boost Boston recycling rate
By adamg on Tue, 05/29/2012 - 7:21am
Start charging for trash bags or at the least, start enforcing the city ordinance against putting recyclables in the trash, our own eeka suggests.
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Comments
I want our town to do the same thing
My town out in the sticks already monitors stuff in the trash and will not take the trash if it has recyclables in it. But as eeka says, a better way to do it is to simply charge for trash - pay as you throw - and take recyclables for free. The resistance to pay-as-you-throw is unbelievable here, you'd think we were asking people to pay full price for any kids they had in the schools. At a time when towns have extraordinarily tight budgets, it's such a simple way to save money.
Regardless of what happens in my town, we're unaffected because we live in a townhouse and the town doesn't even collect our trash - or recyclables. We still go thru the effort of collecting, then bringing everything to the recycling center.
So what do you propose for
So what do you propose for apartment/condo complexes which have several dozen to hundreds of units and currently rely on common dumpsters?
Sticker system?
Instead of counting bags on a pickup-by-pickup basis from any given location, all households could be issued N amount of stickers to use over the course of a set time period (possibly distributed with the annual town census). Just slap a sticker on a bag and done. If one is out of stickers, additional stickers can be purchased at a moderately steep premium. There are a couple of ways to deal with bags w/out stickers on them.
You could probably also develop a secondary market in selling stickers from some low-waste households to people willing or needing to pay to dispose of more than their recognized allotment. Students could save up stickers during vacations for the big end-of-term garbage-paloozas. It could have its own category on Craigslist, next to the missed connections.
Sounds like a great
Sounds like a great opportunity for graft, theft, and fraud.
I don't have a good answer for that
No dumpsters here. Even though we put our trash out in barrels like everybody else, the town won't collect it because it's a private drive. We have to hire a private hauler who will take anything (to a point) and the town has no control over it. The condo association itself would have to impose its own rules and that ain't gonna happen. The last thing a condo association needs is more rules. ;-)
Because of their nature, condos out here tend to generate less trash. There are generally 1-2 people per unit, and the lack of yardwork, maintenance, etc. limits the trash. At our place, people generally don't even fill up one barrel.
There are some towns that simply do not collect trash and residents have to hire their own trash hauler. I wish we would do that because it forces people to limit their trash and recycle more.
Charging for trash bags will
Charging for trash bags will result in illegal dumping. It has already happened in the few towns which do this.
And really, do we really want to have the city government so involved in our everyday lives that they are regulating and policing something as private as household trash? Whats next, having an inspector stopping by for dinner to make sure we are eating our vegetables?
This is exactly what would happen
Come trash day morn you'd wonder where that extra bag or two came from. And if you don't put one of your stickers on it, what are you going to do with it? Leave it there?
Charging for food will result
Charging for food will result in illegal stealing. Charging for housing will result in illegal squatting.
Shall we go on?
Why is it fair to charge for so many necessities of life, but "not fair" to charge for trash pick-up (or roads, for that matter)?
You are already paying for it
It's already in your property taxes - even if you rent you are paying property taxes via your landlord.
Part of the problem is that if you save the city money they don't give it back or offer any extra services - they basically roll it into the general fund and treat it as a bonus for city workers when it comes time for collective bargaining. The pie gets bigger and bigger while the labor force shrinks. Then they tell you we need more public/private partnerships to pay for basic services we used to be able to afford like trash removal.
Now if they could somehow give me a credit on my taxes for recycling instead of trashing stuff... Oh crap I just woke up. Silly me, even dreaming the city would ever give anything back or otherwise cut their revenue stream.
(taking my tongue out of my cheek for a moment, for the record I very actively recycle and we strongly encourage everyone in our building to do the same-I think we could be better, but we're pretty good - I'd guess about 50%)
Maybe we should switch from a
Maybe we should switch from a property tax-based system to a weight-based system. Or maybe that wouldn't work out for other reasons, such as cost or perverse incentives. Maybe the corruption in this city is too high to ever entertain notions of fixing things.
But I think it's silly to assume that trash pick-up is so fundamentally different that you cannot even think about treating it like market provision of housing or food. Especially since some places manage to do it.
Keep in mind
Businesses pay 60% of property taxes- including trash hauling/DPW even though they have to have their own trash privately hauled. Of the remaining 40% probably at least 1/3 of that is paid for by downtown residents. If you went to a "fee for service" method the residents now have to pick up 100% of the tab. Even if you netted it out of the taxes - say a 1% discount - it would cost the typical resident a multiple of what they are paying now for a pay as you go system - plus you need monitoring, collection and a host of other logistical issues.
I'm all for out of the box thinking - just not sure how we would make this work. Nice in theory but there are some big gremlins in the details.
Fair has nothing to do with it.
It's perfectly fair, and reasonable, and a good idea, to charge by the bag for trash pickup. And the system works well in smaller, more closely knit, more homogenous communities of people who self-police and who basically follow the rules (umm.. rich suburbs, to some degree?).
It works horribly if there are a substantial number of people who won't follow the rules, because illegal dumping is nearly impossible to police.
And so, the question, in practical terms, for the city of Boston, is not only what's fair, but what's practical: How are we going to minimize the combined cost of collecting trash and cleaning up after illegal dumpers.
It works in Japan
But I don't think people here are as willing to abide by rules of this sort.
Japan is definitely a bad example
Two experiences in Japan:
1) When getting my driver's license I showed them my expired passport which had the date I had entered the country which was key to proving I had been living there for at least 6 months - a requirement for a license. They said they couldn't accept that because it was expired. I had to go home and get my current passport which only had a visa stamped in it but no date of entry because they could only accept a current passport - even though it proved little other than I was legally in the country - but a valid passport was the rule.
2) My favorite - Went to a Hiroshima Carp game with my wife one night - bought tix WAAAAAY up in the right field bleachers - literally nobody around - imagine center field in Fenway and you are the only two people there. Three Japanese businessmen walk up in suits carrying trays of sushi (which cracked my wife up that you could buy sushi at a ballpark). They look at their tickets, look at us, look at their tickets and have a conference. I'm guessing they got the guy who knew how to say "These our seats" to talk to us. I apologized and said "Douzo" and we jumped into the seats behind them - which weren't our seats either. Everybody was happy and we probably all had a good cultural experience. I wonder if they tell the story about the stupid gaijin who couldn't find his seats among the 3000 empty ones around us. Either that or we are the butt of some Japanese hidden camera show!
Yes - they follow the rules - ALL of them and you can do this in Japan - here people will dig an envelope out of their neighbor's trash and stick it in your bag so you get fined for illegal dumping.
Hiroshima Carp!!
Loved that stadium. It's about 100m from ground zero. I went there off season and there was nobody around and the door was wide open, so we snuck in and took some pictures :)
The hat looks very similar to a Chicago Cubs cap.
Well, it's a GOOD example...
... of people willing to follow the rules.
My wife and I never got as far south as Hiroshima -- maybe next time....
Well at least recyclables aren't be thrown in the trash
For a while I noticed that the trash trucks would take the separated out recyclables. I don't recall the circumstances, but I thought - no wonder Boston has a such a low recycling rates - the trash collectors were scooping their recycling collectors. I complained and I can't be the only one. Have noticed that my street anyway gets a recycling truck first.
Large apartment
Large apartment buildings in poorer neighborhoods don't usually provide recycling containers, and the city doesn't appear to give them any incentive to start.
The City of Boston requires
The City of Boston requires that landlords of apartment buildings with at least 7 units provide recycling for the tenants. I once lived in a building in Brighton with no recycling and when I asked nicely (and pointed out the regulation), the landlord complied and gave us a cart.
The city will drop them off
Any tenant can request bins from the city. We got two delivered to our apartment when we moved in.
They used to charge you
The recycling czarina told us we had to pay $75 each for two large wheely barrels - now they give them to you up to a point at least. I'm guessing really big buildings need a dedicated dumpster.
They won't do it.
To many poor people with a lot of kids will end up paying more and/or their streets will be littered with unbagged trash on trash day. Nightmare to enforce in many areas of Boston.
In theory a great idea on the enforcement side, but you are basically making people pay more for having more kids.
Why is that a problem?
???
So? Should we subsidize large, 7, 8, 15 passenger vehicles because it is so unfair that large families have to pay more?
Should we start a per-child subsidy for housing because it is "unfair" that large families need more space?
Explain the reasoning as to why people with a lot of kids shouldn't pay more than a single, couple, or small family for producing more trash.
For the same reason they don't pay for schools (per pupil)
You already subsidize plenty of things like housing and transportation.
I'm not saying you don't have to do it like that, I'm just saying that is why they won't do it in a city like Boston.
Everyone is already
Everyone is already complaining about how hard and expensive it is to have a family in the city. Do we really need to add "expensive trash disposal" to that litany of difficulties?
No kids = no future tax payers = demographic doom. See Japan & some countries in Western Europe for examples how this eventually becomes a disaster
Here's a better idea, then
One elderly couple on our street generate 3x as much garbage as our 4 person family.
Maybe a "pay as you throw" system is more appropriate. Generate lots of garbage = pay a higher fee for a larger dumpster can.
Lots of cities do this. This creates an incentive to reduce waste.
Have to agree.
While it might work in a smaller town where enforcement and neighbor shaming can be a deterrent, in a city it be too easy to stay anonymous and just chuck your trash. Plus, you'd start getting people illegal dumping into business' dumpsters.
I'm all for incentivising and promoting recycling, but trying tax bad behavior on trash pickup is not going to work when the alternative is just jumping it on the streets. Which is the whole reason we moved to municipal trash pickup in the first place.
Don't they have trash / recycling facilities now that can separate trash from recyclables pretty well on their own?
The focus can be in influencing people to recycle, but if you make trash pickup too unreasonable or too expensive, people are just going to start find other places to put it. It's human nature.
So what happens when someone
So what happens when someone in Boston, under this plan, puts our trash without the paying the pickup fee. So the trash truck leaves this trash on the street and then what?
It often comes down to the collection monopolies
There ARE collection companies that handle separating trash and recycling, but it often comes down to resistance toward changing who handles pickup. Maybe it is slow going in the US, but it is widespread in China and growing in EU locations.
Here's an article on "single bin pickup" companies, and the political resistance they frequently run into trying to compete and operate in new markets.
It's typical of Boston politics to suggest a fine to make a difference, or force everyone to jump through hoops. Changing public behavior is incredibly hard, and in many cases like apartments recycling is a very significant challenge in a practical sense. Changing the company you pay to haul your garbage should be less hard, if they don't have friends in government doing them favors.
There are better ways to get the majority of the gains sought than just trying to penalize people all the time. I for one would love just having one bucket to throw everything into and I don't see why anyone wouldn't. How about a little creativity for once?
Sincerely,
Market-oriented environmentalist
My town went to giant
My town went to giant recycling barrels. With the new system, recycling immediately went up. In fact, recycling went up so much that they can't recycle it all, and some of it is dumped in the landfill every week.
Maybe I'm a wierdo but....
I kind of enjoy rinsing out bottles, cans, and plastics and putting them in the recycling bins and then putting them out.
Wierdo! :)
But I guess I am one too. More in reclycling each week than actual trash.
Pay as you throw is a great theory. However, empirical evidence leads me to beleive this unfortunately would not end well for some places...
Join the club!
I'm a weirdo too. If you're ready to take it up a notch, try composting.
Me, too!
Years ago, I didn't give two shits about recycling. Reading about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch changed my mind. Now I'm obsessive about it. The back seat of my car looks like I'm a damn hoarder some weeks!
The town I grew up in south
The town I grew up in south of Boston, Holbrook, does the charge for trashbags. It was $21 for 10 small kitchen size bags. That was a while ago so I am not sure what it is now. The recycling went way up but it was a struggle for some people to buy the bags.
Pay as you throw does not
Pay as you throw does not work. Ask the residents of Malden how this is working out for them. Its a 100% scam in Malden. The former mayor has family members who own the company that makes the bags AND another family member owns the hauler. Its a scam and doesn't work.
Malden now has a problem where people will dump trash anywhere... private dumpsters, city trash recepticals, or if the trash folks don't pick it up cuz its not in a Malden City Trash Bag, it just sits there.. and sits there.. and sits there until its all over the place and the street sweepers just pick it up. Any empty lot now has some sort of illegally dumping trash. OR they just take it over the town line and dump it in front of someone's house on trash day (I know 2 Malden residents who do this to avoid paying for the bags).
What would REALLY work is do what Everett and Revere do. Outsource the entire thing to paid recycling. This means residents get paid to recycle. The more you recycle, the more you get paid. You get paid in giftcards, you just have to logon to their website and redeem them. Money talks folks...
How do Everett and Revere's
How do Everett and Revere's programs work? How do they measure how much you recycle? I tried to look it up, but I only found a third-party website full of Flash crap.
Recycling more isn't a good thing. We should be recycling less, but throwing away even less.
In Revere we use the
In Revere we use the Recyclebank program. You earn points depending on the weight of your recycled material. As Cybah pointed out you can convert those points to rewards and get gift cards or coupons for various retailers, products, services, etc.
Ha! I was just going to chime
Ha! I was just going to chime in with a "When I lived in Malden ..." It was a mess. And when I was living in Malden, I was broke all the time, as many Maldenites (Maldenians?) are, and it really sucked to have to shell out so much cash for trashbags. We did really step up our recycling but man, sometimes, it was a struggle. Especially if you had to throw away something really foul but the bag was only half-full and you were loathe to throw away $2 ...
PAYT is not cool
I had to deal with it in Worcester when I went to college. The worst was realizing it was trash day and you ran out of the 10 (?) bag roll they sold at the supermarket and had to run out and get more. Then if you walked around the lesser parts of town you'd see trash on the sidewalk and old black plastic bags.
Arlington just tried to pitch PAYT and thank god that didn't get through. Like many things it's good in theory, but kinda sucks in practice.
Arlington ended up saving money on their new contract by increasing recycling to every week, and limiting every household to three barrels of trash a week. I have a 2-family there and all of us maybe generate a barrel a week as it is.
As Cybah said, it sucks. I
As Cybah said, it sucks. I wish I wrote this earlier as this point it is now buried. But I repeat, it sucks. Refer to Cybah for more like ways to modify behavior without resorting to fines.
Make it that there's a limited amount of space to fit in a trash can or two.
Give incentives rather than penalties to handle modify behavior.
But, don't give another system that give another path for grath and corruption. And this is a site that my understanding that tends to have view Boston's government with a lot of trust to do the right thing and have sincere intentions.
In Malden, this program is causing a lot of pain. The the person who argued that charging for food will cause illegal stealing and that example. Well, you have to look at the pros and cons here. The results. The result in Malden is trash, people trying to dump trash anywhere as possible, and removal of public trash bins (which causes more litter and have to be a town that barely offer public trash bins now). It is also causing much more distrust and cynicism with people and the government. Is this what we want to accomplish? Isn't there a better way to get the results we want with less of the detriments?
Don't think charging for trash bags is a good idea. Look at Malden and know the result. There's better ways to get the goal without attacking the wallets of your neighbors and/or making a deal with the government who are thinking a much different type of green than Eeka or any other supporter here are thinking.
The problem is that illegal
The problem is that illegal dumping is hard to trace and easy to forge.
Bad reasoning. By this logic, charging for any basic, civilized necessity is "attacking the wallets of your neighbor."
Should we stop charging for electricity usage? After all, that's "attacking your wallet." Or stop charging for gas? That's "attacking your wallet."
Or maybe that's how things work in a normal market. Now trash pick-up may be different because we can't seem to figure out a way to police illegal dumping. Some places have figured that out, but we don't want to do what they do, or don't have their cultural norms.
Matthew, I believe the
Matthew, I believe the argument for to do a pay-as-you-throw is for environmental reasons. The call to change from property tax to this system is because some people want to see more recycling and not because of a desire to put it the market with an onus to personal ownership to waste.* So this is proposal to make others change their behavior by attacking wallets. This is different from arguing for free electricity. This is disapproval in how to realize an ideal.
Now that said, even removing the point of "attacking neighbor's wallets" as invalid and overly rhetorical. What about the results we see in Malden? What about the argument that the same ideal can still be realized via other means with less of the drawbacks here? What about the distrust sewn in the community from such action? What about if you can really believe Boston other other town will use the Pay-As-You-Throw with good faith and not abuse it (and I think this site is one of those sites who don't believe in Boston or Massachusetts that well)? Those all of this price that will occur worth this goal?
*I want to note at this moment a tangent. I don't believe things that are utilities like power, water, gas, heat, transportation, health care, and others should be subject to market forces (mostly). The ideal of that market forces will create better service by the desire to win customers doesn't work when people can't walk away. Instead, the profit motive will drive companies to find as many ways as possible to rip/scam the customers. See what Health Insurance companies are doing to "customers" now that it is mandatory. Or take example of Enron when California privatized electricity. That said, I'm still not arguing for free electricity, though I do hope one day we can reach abundance economy as we discover new technology like fusion in some future. Heck, didn't someone just said Malden's old mayor put family members to profit over the ordinance?
Right now it's flat fee. Like
Right now it's flat fee. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, there's no limits to how much resource you consume (in practice there might be), which means that some customers are going to be much more expensive than others. Like an all-you-can-eat buffet, this is also going to generate a lot of trash.
The net effect is that everyone is paying more because some folks are using a lot. Much like bandwidth and flat rates. With the pay-as-you-go system, you may end up saving a lot of money by being frugal.
The problem is, of course, that people are dishonest and being "frugal" might instead be a cover for "illegal dumping." So, without a good answer for that, the flat fee (property tax) is probably the best way to go. And of course, you could institute a kind of "reward" system instead. Much like the bottle return deposit.