Four neighboring towns – Billerica, Burlington, Tewksbury, and Tyngsborough – have agreed to sign one contract for solid waste collection and are ready to join with a fifth for a separate pact for collection of white goods, or large appliances. Those ventures could lead to further collaboration, with more communities joining in, and significant municipal savings with an accompanying increase in recycling and reduction in fuel use, officials say.
“It's a positive regional collaboration that is based on the initiative of the municipalities,” said Tewksbury Town Manager David G. Cressman, a lead negotiator for the communities.
[Crossposted from ONE Massachusetts]
Please share widely!
at least in this sense:
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p>The reality is that people’s trash is correlated with the size of their bins. My parents, in Roanoke VA, have trash collection like the one described above. The two of them often fill their 64 gallon bin.
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p>The four of us [my parents and my brother and I, when he and I were growing up] used two “normal” sized trash cans. Bigger trash cans will lead to more trash. 64 gallon cans are simply too big.
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p>If you really want to help the environment with respect to solid waste, implement pay as you throw. Charge people per pound/gallon/bag, and they’ll throw out less. Less trash, less labor to collect the trash, and less fuel to cart the trash around.
the 64 gallon trash bins have impacted our town in a positive way. We’ve adopted the one trash bin last year, just from the naked eye recycling bins are full and in front of most homes. Some people have more than a single plastic and paper bin in front of their house. That could have been all trash prior.
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p>I don’t recall seeing recycling bins in front of all homes prior. I see it as a means of pushing recycling, those who use a good amount of plastic or paper products mostly don’t have a choice other than to recycle, there is not enough room in your trash bin to just throw everything away.
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p>I have three young ones in my home, do you know how many milk gallons we go through in a week and how much room it would take up in a trash can? If we put all that out as trash I would need more than two small trash cans. Pay as you throw does have a similar impact, it’s just a pain to deal with. We could have smaller containers but I think we need a method that is simple.
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p>You have a single trash bin at your house, that’s all you get. You can recycle as much as you want, we provide free recycling bins if you need more than 2. The town recycling center can be used if the bins don’t meet your needs for a particular week. I got a exercise bike last year, it’s packed in a cardboard box with cardboard inside and styrofoam, can really fit in your normal recycling bin and you need to do something with the styrofoam, in those cases just drop by the recycling center. Done. It’s an easy process and you just can’t throw it away anymore.
I’m not opposed to the concept of standardization, I’m opposed to a family — of any size — creating 64 gallons of trash each week. It’s not sustainable, and it’s entirely avoidable.
In the case of the milk gallons, if you go through 4 or 5 in a week that’s a 1/4 of your container, is that really 16 gallons of trash? No. If they are flattened and you have 30 of them in there then it is. But what I think is happening or what is changing in the community is that it changes how people think. Instead of just throwing away a plastic container or a box they start to think about how much room it’s going to take in their container. It changes the thought process. I think it’s one of the best ideas the town has made. Yes, 64 gallons container is a lot, if it’s smaller my guess is people will do more to recycle. They will adjust.
Taxpayers should not subsidize pollution, which is what trash is even if incinerated. Well-designed PAYT programs cut pollution, increase recycling, and lower taxes.
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p>However, subsidized trash pickup is very popular, and the benefits of PAYT are not so great that local officials are inclined to expend political capital for it. Absent a vocal constituency to end trash subsidies, anyway.
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p>(Don’t get me started on the stupidity of subsidizing pollution.)
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p>For these communities, going to a single 64-gallon-bin system is a kind of back-door PAYT. 64 gallons is a lot, but is still an improvement over “unlimited”. The automated collection means one employee replaces two, so the savings are significant and can be sold to taxpayers on that basis.
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p>I don’t know what’s best, but doing nothing would be worst.
64 may be too big to be the sweet spot, and may in fact encourage more trash not less.
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p>Consider: if a person used to have 2 28 gallon barrels, he used to have 56 gallons of trash, and started feeling the pinch as they filled. Now, he’s got 8 more gallons of room… and may in fact generate more trash than he used to.
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p>I’m not suggesting that this will happen to everyone, but I am suggesting that its possible that the 64 gallon barrels will induce some people to actually generate more trash.
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p>It would be nice if the town introduced multiple barrel sizes that all worked with the machine, and charged different rates. For example, something like:
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p>20 gal $50/yr
30 gal $80/yr
40 gal $120/yr
50 gal $170/yr
60 gal $230/yr
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p>Scale it so that dropping down 10 gallons results in a greater dollar percentage than the percentage savings, to encourage people to choose the smallest bin possible. End result: the least amount of trash collected.
if he is always filling up his barrels, my guess is that he’d just get another one at some point. It’s unlimited after all. But when you are in fact limited then you feel the pinch and do something (like recycle more). I don’t fill my barrel each week, nor do I feel the need to start throwing more things away if there is extra room in the barrel.
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p>I think we are stuck with the one size, the arm of the garbage truck and size might limit what can be done. Plus the one size is much easier to administer. But you do raise an interesting point, who came up with 64 gallons and why.
the idea is that the town provides the barrel because it fits with the truck, and that a household only gets one.
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p>I find it hard to believe that one size is “much” easier to administer. Six sizes need not be offered either; 2 or 3 should be sufficient. And, I’m sure the truck could be designed to handle different sizes, or that the barrels themselves could be designed well enough.
… that the “one size” requirements for pickup usually come about because of automated pickup mechanisms on the trucks?
but it can pick up many different sized cups.
Certainly my hand is also a much much much more sophisticated tool for grabbing things than we can expect to be designed for (or paid for) a garbage truck. Certainly you could write up a spec for the garbage can designs that are acceptable to the specific pick-up device. Just as easy to specify a particular product.
There are actually 2 injection molded polyethylene standard bins, both with grips that fit an American Standard standard lift.
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p>An injection molder could easily design a mold with that same grip, but there appears to not be significant demand for anything other than the standard sizes: 64 gallon and 96 gallon.
that the robotic arm and hand can certainly grab different sized bins now [make one six inches shorter, for example… I’d bet dollars to donuts that the arm could grab it too]. For what is likely a slight differentiation in spec, the shoulder joint could have a few more degrees of pitch to get even shorter barrels.
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p>Barrels with a smaller circumference might be tougher… but short barrels would likely be quite easy, and the money saved by discouraging extra production of waste would likely pay for itself over time.
Pay per pound or volume … great idea, stomv. I’ve never agreed with many of your comments, but this is a great idea.
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p>I don’t know whether the arm could be designed to weigh each bin accurately as they are picked up. Even if it could, isn’t volume more important than weight?
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p>If you wanted to charge dynamically for volume, keep the containers all the same exterior size and shape for maximum curb-side efficiency but molded-in inserts could change the interior volume — 64, 58, 32 cu. ft., etc. (This assumes the arm cannot be modified to pick up shorter containers.)
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p>Different colors for different interior capacities (green for the smallest, of course, and red for the largest.)
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p>Include RFID tags in the bins so households can be dynamically charged on the basis total volume: # of bins times volume of bins.
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p>Quick. Someone at BMG get this patented!
After all, there’s the very real problem of people adding their trash to your curbside bin. When you start PAYT programs, it’s inevitable. So, charging by weight is problematic, especially since, as you point out, volume is likely more important anyway.
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p>Keep it simple stupid. Have a few different size bins, and charge accordingly. The net result will be a reduction in trash, an increase in recycling, and better behavior all around.
Conservatives don’t have a monopoly on trying to properly construct markets.
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p>The conservative mantra that I’m familiar with speaks of “unfettered free markets.” Which I find odd, because I learned in the second week of micro that lots of markets have external costs. Most environmental topics have this problem (see, for starters, CO2 emissions). But designing a market that is economically efficient requires internalizing these costs; otherwise, you get textbook market failure. This means: taxation, cap ‘n’ trade, etc.
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p>You know, well-designed fetters.
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p>Now, I know there are conservatives that support such approaches (see, e.g., McCain-Lieberman), but that’s not exactly the Grover Norquist school of thought.
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p>BTW- weight matters. Given their compression capabilities, I’m not sure that trash vehicles cube out before they weigh out (though in practice I suspect they cube out first). But secondly, if this stuff is getting landfilled, the weight is a better proxy for how much methane is going to be emitted over time. I also think it’d be a lot simpler to sense weight than cube when loading up, though I appreciate your creativity.
Much of what goes in a landfill won’t release methane — it’s plastic. Also, volume is easier to measure than weight, because you can just declare the volume of the container to be the [upper bound of the] volume of the trash. If you’re going to weigh it, it means that you’ve got to actually weigh each receptacle every time, and that’s a bit of a hassle and requires data collection and calibration of sensors, as well as connecting the data collection to the billing, plus no opportunity to appeal a measurement. Finally, if I put my bin on the street and somebody squeezes in a bag of their own, no worries if measured by volume but it actually costs me money if measured by weight.
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p>Lots of good reasons to simply measure the size of the receptacle.
Aren’t we talking about general trash? Sure, some stuff will not get decomposed anaerobically, but some will. Hence the methane in landfills we observe today.
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p>But I concede the other point; weighing every trash bin would be insane.
is any talk about the other half of the problem. We need to encourage and incentivize stores to incorporate recyclable packaging. We recycle as much as we can at my house, but when an item comes packed in Styrofoam, that packaging is destined to wind up in the trash. If we can get stores to be responsible as well, the day will come when even 32 gallons per house is considered a lot of trash.
But in other terms, it is happening. As the price of fuel goes up, the cost of extra packaging is increasing, both because most of it is petrol-based, and because too much packaging means less product on the same 18-wheeler. So, there is some pressure from big box stores on their suppliers to cut down on the packaging.
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p>P.S. My house produces about 2-4 gallons of trash a week — one plastic shopping bag worth per week. If we could compost, we might cut that down by another 0.5 gallons.
… and we have a milk man with reusable glass bottles.
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p>Now, I’d imagine that the lifecycle impacts of delivered milk vs. plastic gallon containers are probably not that different.
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p>We mainly do it for convenience. I’d be interested in figuring out the relative impacts some time (there’s certainly enough studies out there, but they all have a lot of ‘it depends’), but my main focus in terms of reducing our impacts on the world is insulating our house- heating is by far our most significant carbon footprint issue.
Returnable glass bottles, cloth diapers, etc., all use plenty of energy. I’ll wager glass bottles are LESS energy efficient than disposable cartons or plastic.
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p>If it were more efficient to use glass bottles, everyone would still be using them. Embedded in the cost of use reusable containers is the item’s total cost of energy to manufacture, distribute, pick up, sanitize, refill, recap, and redistribute.
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p>There’s more labor involved in their manufacturing and reuse, and that labor needs to commuted to their place of work.
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p>Plus the energy required to obtain the raw materials for glass may be greater than for disposable products.
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p>If the cost of recycling is greater than the cost of a new container, why advocate recycling?
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p>Has anyone done an analysis of the energy it takes to recycle? The law of economics demands that something less expensive takes less energy to manufacture, distribute, and dispose of, because those costs are embedded in their price.
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p>That’s the flaw in recycling dogma: ignoring the signals pricing provide.
The answer to your last question is yes. It’s called lifecycle analysis.
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p>The sentence after your last question I believe to be false. Prices do not necessarily serve as a perfect proxy for embedded energy. In rich countries especially, labor costs are a significant portion of the cost of something. Gov. Spitzer paid an awful lot for certain services, but I think the carbon footprint of said services is fairly low.
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p>You can argue that these labor costs ultimately translate to energy costs, but I don’t think that’s correct. What if Spitzer’s suppliers invested their money in plants manufacturing PV panels (which do have excellent EROEI [energy returned on energy invested], by the way.
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p>That’s the flaw in criticism of recycling: ignoring the details behind why pricing signals aren’t always correct (see: external costs).
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p>In closing, I mentioned that I wasn’t sure that the glass bottles were better (more convenient, less potential health issues, old school). We get them b/c I like them more, and I’m pretty sure the difference between the two (bottles vs plastic) pales in comparison to other components of my environmental footprint.
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p>Having said “in closing”, here’s one more:
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p>
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p>To which I say two things: Current practices were established in a time of low oil prices. And, my favorite criticism of efficient market fans:
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Here are some numbers
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p>Of course, these results are always based on certain assumptions that are hard to validate but… you seem to have lost your wager; what do I get?
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p>Of course, these numbers are for store-bought bottles vs. delivered. Which brings us to the next question, how much fuel does the milk man burn per bottle delivered vs. the incremental decrease in our trips to the store (and there is definitely a decrease)? Don’t know, but given the relative prices of delivered vs. store-bought milk (to use your metric), it’s probably close to a wash.
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p>So you probably still lose your wager.
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p>Cheers.
Containers (1/2 gal.) Energy (kWh)* Recycling Rates
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p>Refillable Glass (20 trips) 895 Approx. 20 percent
Plastic 1,428 29 percent
Paperboard Carton 1,945 Negligible
Single-Use Glass 3,267 Approx. 20 percent
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p>And yes, we use refillable glass.
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p>Crescent Ridge Dairy
to the opening sentence:
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p>
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p>In our town, we’ve done some audits and have found that we could spend roughly $800k to save $160k per year in energy costs through better lighting, insulation, heating systems, etc. That’s a 5 year payback, with means an IRR of 15+% over a 10 year window (20% over 20 years). Purely on a financial basis, that’s a good return.
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p>And those savings were computed using dated energy costs.
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p>We can’t conserve our way to zero energy use, but I bet most towns are leaving significant money on the table.
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p>What’s tragic is how hard it is to get funding for such projects, even when the financials are a slam dunk. And how long it takes to build awareness and understanding of the wasted energy that surrounds us.
There is a condescending, gee-whiz context for these kinds of stories, as if (in this case) no one had ever thought of regionalizing trash collection before.
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p>The truth is probably that the universe of communities that (a) are small enough to benefit from this (b) provide trash pickup & disposal, (c) are contiguous and (d) haven’t done this already–is small.
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p>It’s lazy reporting that runs with the conventional wisdom that gummint = stupid and local gummint = hicks. With donuts.
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p>Along those lines: Charley, ever heard of regional school districts?
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p>I don’t mean to let cities and towns off the hook–they could be lots greener, and those that offer trash pickup should charge for it. But there is also real innovation going on locally.
Glad to see the inefficient public sector is thinking the same way.
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p>GM, Boeing, Microsoft, office building owners, truck fleet operators …. energy saving is already built-in to their daily operations. The more energy costs, the more quickly new savings are identified and captured.
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p>In my condo building alone, we saved $40,000/yr in electricity by installing self-contained, step-down lighting in all the stairwells. Payback was 3 years or something short like that.
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p>One benefit of higher energy prices is the acceleration of this cycle.
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p>The laggards are, of course, the public sector. Think the Turnpike Authority sits around thinking about how to save money? They’re more focused on preserving & expanding inefficient jobs, increasing benefits, and winning increases in taxes through tolls.