In most cities the cost of garbage collection and landfills is covered by property taxes. Neenah, Wisconsin is trying a new approach to funding garbage collection, and by doing so they’re hoping to reduce the amount of garbage collected.
The proposed plan would do away with traditional dumpsters, residents would buy bags for their garbage, at $2.40 a bag, garbage collectors will only pick up the official city bags each week. The logic behind this trash reduction plan is that people will want to save money by buying fewer bags, which would encourage less trash disposal and reduce landfill/collection costs. Like tollways for drivers, paying by the bag puts the expense more directly on people using garbage collection and landfill space. It’s sort of like “pay as you go,” but “pay as you throw.” It equitably spreads the cost around to everyone living in Neenah, not just property owners. Right now, the owner of a $150,000 home pays about $130 a year for garbage removal. If that person throws out one bag a week, it would cost about $125. Two bags would cost $250 yearly.
Enviro Girl likes this plan because it directly taxes consumption as opposed to property taxes that have no bearing on how much garbage a household generates. Enviro Girl demonstrated last week how her family throws away about 1 tall kitchen garbage bag per week, yet they live on 60 acres. Is it fair for her to contribute more to garbage collection/landfill taxes than people living on a city lot throwing away three times as much garbage each week?
Fees make people aware of their behavior–just as with shopping bags (when charged for shopping bags, people will use fewer bags than if they’re offered a rebate for bringing their own bag). She also likes the fact that this plan assesses the cost of garbage more directly to people using collection services. Want to save money? Throw away less stuff. The incentives are inherent in the proposed plan.
Yet Enviro Girl lives in the country and every year she finds trash that people dump on her property because they don’t want to pay to dispose of their old tires or electronics properly. There is a legitimate fear that people will dump their trash on other people’s property just to save money.
Enviro Girl will be curious to see if this innovative plan will become the rule in Neenah. Meanwhile, she applauds their creativity in addressing the problem of too much garbage consuming too many of our resources.
Tell the Eco Women: What do you think of the Neenah Plan to Pay As You Throw? Can it work? Or will people cling to their trashy habits and reject the idea?
My town has two different ways you can pay for garbage disposal:
1) You can buy an annual sticker for your trash can(s). The cost of the stickers is determined by the size of the can. For example, we buy one annual sticker that is $100 for a 32 gallon can. Out of 52 weeks of the year, we might fill our trash can 3 or 4 times; the other weeks, we have one or two bags in it.
2. You can buy stickers for your garbage bags and they cost a dollar or two each (I can’t remember how much).
Unfortunately, what happens under this system is that the people who can afford the annual stickers get them. The people who cannot buy the per-bag stickers and, if they run out and can’t afford to get more, they either let their garbage pile up until they can get the stickers (thereby causing vermin issues) or they dump their trash where it should not be (tossing it out of the car and illegally using businesses’ dumpsters).
That said, illegal dumping isn’t a huge problem here. And I much prefer to pay for my garbage disposal based on my family’s usage.
The sticker idea is a good one, too. It’s still pay as you throw!
The annual sticker would mean less paperwork, I’d venture. We make so little garbage at Chez Okay, a pay as you throw would be a moneysaver.
Bags? So not green, don’t you guys have wheelie bins? I hope those are biodegradable bags!
I don’t like the idea because of the admin involved, also the people who can’t afford it and would just let their waste rot where it stood. This should be covered by taxes. Maybe charging households which produce an excess over what is considered reasonable based on how many people live there as it’s not entirely fair to penalise homes with more occupants.
But I believe the best approach is to cut it out at source. I’d fine companies which package excessively. If they use only green packaging they don’t have to pay, but for every gram of non-recyclable plastic they use I’d tax them and also if they use plastic which is hard to recycle they would have to get involved in a scheme to recall and recycle that plastic!
I can hardly bear to go in supermarkets these days as the amount of unnecessary plastic gets me down.
Neenah. First a paperweight museum, and now pay-as-you-go trash service? They are SO ahead of the times.
No, but really, I love the idea of pay-as-you go… but I worry about people who just don’t care enough to bother. Will they just let the trash pile up rather than plan ahead… and pay… for bags?
In my town, we have HUGE trash cans (I don’t know what the volume is, but I guess it would hold 10 pretty full white kitchen trash bags). In my opinion, there is no incentive to bother recycling when you can throw it in the trashcan and there is always room for more. I usually have 1 bag in the trashcan, but I see other cans out in my neighborhood that are so full they can’t close.
I can’t wait to hear how it pans out for Neenah.
I wish they’d convert our ginormous trash dumpsters to recycling and provide us with smaller trash dumpsters to give people better incentive.