In our suburban neighborhood in Seattle, we paid around $50 a month to a monopoly carrier that provided us “authorized” cans for trash, recycle, and yard waste. If we exceeded the cans, we’d be charged an overage. When they just didn’t make recycling pickups for a few months, they were fined by the state but did not issue service credit to customers who had to take their recycling to the local recycling center (“we don’t issue refunds” – apparently they weren’t clear on the whole ‘fraudulently billing for services not rendered” thing). Businesses locked their dumpsters and bins so that nobody else could put trash in them and run up their bill (while complaining that nearby encampments of people experiencing homelessness were “full lof trash” and therefore unhealthy).
We think much more highly of the system we have encountered here. It’s not universal, but it’s common to most urban centers, and we can see why it would be less practical in highly rural areas.
Costs
Although the city contracts the service, we don’t pay a separate vendor. Rather, there’s a charge for waste disposal built in to our water bill. This charge is proportional – a restaurant will pay more than a small residence, for example. And the charge is significantly smaller.
Bins
We aren’t issued any bins, and nobody measures how much we put in them. Rather, neighborhood bins exist on nearly every block, and anyone can put items in them. As a shared resource, it’s considered rude to take up more than your fair share of space – so if you have a lot of, for example, cardboard, you’d wait until one of the pikcup days to ‘stuff the box’ or to tie your cardbord into a bundle and leave it next to the bin if it’s full
They’ve recenrtly added a smart card system to secure the “organico” – which seems like an effort to keep people from absently throwing non-compostable items into the bins. The card system doesn’t yet work reliably, so our bin is rarely secured.
A few times a week, on a set schedule, the bins are emptied – or, you can call the city to request a pickup if something is overfull.
That’s it. if you have waste, you put it in the bin and keep walking. Take your bin bags downstairs and put your stuff in the right bin – no extra charges if you have a lot this week. No jealously guarding your trash. Just a system designed to make it easy for people to keep the city clean and healthy, and dispose of waste in a responsible manner.
