Discussion on:

Trash collection goes high tech to promote recycling

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Austin, Texas has Pay as You Throw. We also have single stream curbside recycling.

Pay as you throw means that the city issued every household a city-owned trash can, and bougt a new fleet of garbage truck that pick up these trash cans and dump their contents. This was at a tremedous cost to the city, and pretty much put private trash cans out of business. the did reduce the garbage trudk crew from 2 to 3, but there was no net savings (see below). I now have a trash can with a City of Austin serial nmuber on it.

The city issues three sizes of trash cans, and you pay based on the size of your can. The city requires that your trash can be closed, and will not pick up any bagged trash not in the can unless it has a $2 sticker on it. Can someone get a small can and put their trash in their neighbor's can? I guess, as long as the neighbors' trash can isn't full and you don't get caught. Still you would only save about $3 a month. People in my neighborhood are not so callous; I don't worry about that. I have a medium sized can, and rarely fill it completely.

Recyling?

Again, we have COA issued serial numbered recyling bins and a COA issued s/n recycling trash can, and a new fleet of recycling trucks that have a robot arm to pick up the recylcing can and dump its contents into the truck, again at a cost of millions of dollars. I guess they took that third person from the garbage truck and put him in the recylcing truck so there was not net savings in pick-up personnel costs. We also had to lease recycling storage facilities, hire sorting personnel to sort paper, plastic, metal, etc, and find a way to transport the recycled materials.

The City of Austin loses millions of dollars a year on our recycling program, paid for by the taxpayers and homeowners in Austin (people who actually work for a living), but we're GREEEEN.

Personally, I hate throwin away someting that can be reused. I love recycling. Before the city instituted this program, I save all my cans, cardboard, paper and ceral boxes, and took it to a private recycler in my pickup, whereupon they would pay me for my efforts. The COA has now denied me this "beer money" (I don't drink beer).

I hate going to fast food places, especially the Austin only places, that serve their food and drink in recyclable materials but don't provide a way to recycle them. WTH? Freebird's goes through tons of aluminum foil, and it all goes into the garbage.

Any time someone has something heavy to throw in the trash, they will throw it on the side of the road or in someone's dumpster. It happens now with any waste that the collector's leave behind. It gets dumped somewhere else. People are not going to pay extra to get rid of heavy things. Stop punishing the little people. Manufacturers need to use less packaging and the trash handlers need to learn how to process more effectively to the point where there are no landfills. Weighing poor people's trash cans is not the answer.

We also have a choice of 3 sizes of city-supplied cans, for ordinary garbage. It's a reasonable compromise between 1-size-fits-all & pay-as-you-throw. There's little incentive for bad behavior. City supplied cans that trucks pick up like dumpsters was inevitable because of labor costs. Recycling was inevitable too. Even though it currently costs more than it brings in because of the low prices for recycled materials, it reduces the volume of garbage going into landfills.

IF it would be decided to use RFID and weigh individual cans THEN the trucks would require periodic (usually every six months) certification of the weighing mechanism to ensure the public that they are being accurately charged. This is yet another added expense and the only real benefit I can see is to the designer/provided of the RFID device and its support equipment. The best program is one that keeps it simple - the three can size will eventually work when the initial equipment cost has been recovered. I don't see using your neighbors can for any excess being a concern as you most likely (or should) know your neighbors and obtain their permission for said use.

I believe that recycling and striving to be more green has more to do with saving the earth???s resources and creating a cleaner, safer environment then it has to do with the economy. Although, isn???t it great that Austin created jobs when they began to recycle?

The last I heard only 20% of people are willing to save the earth at the cost of their pocket book. So, no, for most people recycling is not about saving the earth. It has to be economical and simple, or it's just not going to happen.

Isn't this just a more sophisticated version of something like a 5 cent deposit on a glass bottle? As the deposit has proven, people still throw the stuff out no matter what. And at least the deposit on the recyclables encourages some people to go find and cash in what other people still just throw out just about anywhere.

Now they will know who throws away what to a certain extent. Then what, the garbage police show up at your door for an explanation? This has the potential for just such a scenario. No, I'm not a conspiracy theorist and don't wear tin hats, so don't go there. :=)

I received a brochure from my garbage service yesterday (which they could have included with the bill, but they didn't thereby costing more). They want me to pay $8.00 extra to recycle. Ah, no. I don't think so. The electric company also wants to charge $6.00 extra for electricity from a "green" source. Ummm, no. I'm on a fixed income. When I lived in Sacramento, they gave me three cans, one for recycling which I used as they didn't charge extra. They also charged more for larger trash cans. I had the mid-size and if my neighbors had extra trash, I let then fill mine up as they let me use theirs when needed. Now, I take aluminum cans to a nearby recycler and get paid for them. They don't take glass so in the trash it goes.

They also had a "put your junk in the street and we'll pick it up free" day twice a year. The Russians would come around scavenging. The city frowned on such activity, but I didn't care. I remember putting out some stuff and sure enough, some Russians came by and asked if they could take it. I said they could. They took it all.

I used to take glass to the recycler in California until they wanted me to separate the glass by color. I already had three recycle bins in the garage, I was not about to increase it to six or seven. We left California shortly thereafter (not over this, but for a host of other reasons).

Bottom line: If they make recycling worth my while, I'll do it. If they make it difficult and costly, forget it.

Every where I have lived, recycling has not been a service provided by the waste management company. I'm not going to drive an hour to the closest recycling facility. So, waste management services need to be required to provide recycling services if the arguments of this article are to be considered valid.

Millions of Americans living in our largest cities do so in apartment buildings, where we all share a common trash bin/shute. I'm sure that the building which I am moving into pays a fee to a private hauler. I guess you might consider that "pay as you throw". I think we are looking at this problem from only a couple of angles. When I was a child growing up in NYC, all residential trash (in apartment buildings) was incinerated. Granted, absent today's technology for cleaning the gases and soot produced by this approach left us with filthy air. What it did not leave us with is mountains (orders of magnitude) of trash and the accompanying mice, rats and roaches we have today as well as little room left to dispose of the remains. Perhaps we should be looking at either very efficient (highly regulated) incinerators in apartment buildings and/or trash to energy plants a short haul from origination as a means of disposal. Trying to figure out punitive and discriminatory incentives for getting people to dispose of their trash in a very inefficient system is simply wrong minded. Time for a reality check. Think outside the box.

I would say that paper and cardboard make up the majority of recycled items, followed
by Plastics. John in Ks

A lot of material is light and takes up lots of space. Is that really really helping the landfill situation to charge by weight instead of volume? Weighing the can is at best an inexact measurement, assuming that everyone throws away similar stuff. There is no substitute for education and making recycling easy.

right, instead of looking for a better ways of processing trash , lets just charge more for the same service and do nothing....

do you think you can make your trash smaller?
everybody have a sertanin ammount of things to through away.

we need to find a better way to process the trash in extract all recicables from it at the point of processing not at the curb.

granted it would help if we as people segregate an obviosly recycable items from other trash, but that is not always possible.
and the current system does not make it easy.

Just recently, I have droped a perfectly recycable aluminum case from PC (case only stripped of any electronic components so just alluminum and some plastic) into recycle bin. it was not picked up. infact the whole bin was not picked up, glass and all. WHY?
I put it out twice in a row to let them pick it up. NOTHING.
so in the trash it gose.