Garbage In, Garbage Out Two Days Early
Leighton observes A2 law in action - a complaint about someone who put their trash out a couple days before trash day. Also on the trash front, Ann Arborites are none too happy about the new city-mandated garbage cans, for which users of more than one 62-gallon container will be charged an extra fee. We’ve been unable to find much on the specifics of the plan, which will be implemented in non-student areas first, but we wonder if a household of, say, five adults, which probably generates less waste than five households of one adult each, will be charged extra.
Gosh, each household can generate a truly insane amount of waste and still only pay $30 (really large) or $60 (obscenely large) extra a year. What the heck are those folks griping about? Don’t want to pay the extra $0.57 or $1.15 a week? Recycle more. Seems fair to me.
I agree with AAIO that households with 4 or more adults should get a free upgrade, since they’re generally taxing the system less than four households with one adult each.
AA residents should be happy that they’ll be saving money with the new automatted system. We have it here in certain neighbhorhoods, and it works really well by all accounts and results in fewer back injuries for our waste folks, which results in lower costs for us.
posted by Anna on August 25th, 2004 at 4:37 pmi am constantly SHOCKED how often i see good lookin’ shit in the garbage here. people need to get over themselves and recycle more, or pay the damn fee. and i think the fee just isn’t high enough…
posted by Anonymous on August 25th, 2004 at 4:42 pmAnn Arbor has a decent recycling program- people shold just take a better look at what they’re throwing. I’ve started to observe myself and I’m surprised at how much paper I’m just chucking in the trash.
posted by MattH on August 25th, 2004 at 5:06 pmWe had quite a bit of trouble with waste issues when we first opened. By ordinance we HAD to have a dumpster on our property…which really ticked us off because dumpsters are expensive, and we barely have half a trash bag of “waste” per day….and we were even more shocked to find that trash pick up was free for businesses at the time. Pretty bad way to encourage the reduction of waste if you ask me.
The first and second winters that we were open we had our plow-guy push the snow in front of the dumpster in our rear parking lot, and we didn’t have a single pick up from October to March.
IMHO, trash pick up, like gasoline, should be expensive enough for a consumer to think twice before they make a purchase. The best way to the American consumer’s mind is through their wallet.
posted by todd on August 25th, 2004 at 5:08 pmPersonally, I applaud the extra fee for larger or more numerous cans. I think that garbage service is covered by the property taxes, and five adults living in separate dwellings pay a shitload more in taxes than five adults living in one place.
posted by amy on August 25th, 2004 at 6:13 pmBut the whole point of these consumption taxes is to penalize the people who are consuming the most. People living in a household of many roommates tend to consume the least. And zoning laws, which treat them differently from a family living in the same house, limit where they can live - yet for the purposes of water and trash rates, they are treated exactly the same as a family.
posted by ann arbor is overrated on August 25th, 2004 at 8:19 pmTwo things immediately spring to mind when I think about garbage and fees. First, waste removal costs money in San Francisco, which is by far the filthiest city I’ve ever set foot in. Second, a country whose method of penalizing the wasteful is to charge outrageous fees for very small trash bags. The bags are standard sizes (namely, very small) and the profit goes to funding the waste management facilities. I was told this country recycles 72% of its trash. Very impressive, but it’s a small country.
By contrast, the cities I’ve lived in and visited where waste removal had the appearance of being free, like Ann Arbor, are significantly less trashy.
posted by erin on August 25th, 2004 at 10:15 pmYou have to worry about potential heart attacks among Old Fourth Warders when you see the tide of moving-student trash that has cluttered OFW sidewalks for the past week. Those poor overworked police.
posted by Laura on August 25th, 2004 at 11:46 pm90% of the good looking shit in the trash is left by students, I have a friend that for years made a business of pulling stuff from students trash, fixing it if needed, cleaning it up and selling in the a2 news.
posted by Anonymous on August 26th, 2004 at 11:18 amAbout the “good” trash: I disagree that the best garbage picking comes from student areas. Most students throw away plastic junk from Target that is not particularly useful, though some nice stuff does get pitched as well. I have gotten my best garbage picks (and I’m a fairly serious garbage picker/junk shop troll) from OWS and Burns Park trash. It is really unbelieveable the things that get thrown away .
posted by Alexandra S. on August 26th, 2004 at 12:24 pmThis is the 1st area I’ve lived in that does NOT have garbage pickup 2x a week. This actually bodes well for more recycling / conservation, but it may just be an indicaton that there are fewer diaper-filling machines and parental units around here (not overrated). A kid can visit our house and 40lbs of garbage instantly appears.
We only have enough to put out every two weeks. But here in Ypsi, every day is garbage day, because our stuff is picked through and thinned constantly: recycling through lower living wages!
posted by Leighton on August 26th, 2004 at 2:27 pmWhen I was a kid, Lansing MI was the largest city in America with no municipal garbage collection. Either you had to haul it to the dump yourself, or pay someone to take it away, or burn it.
The result, of course, was that the air was always full of malodorous smoke from trash burning, and the street corners and roadsides were caked in trash that people dumped.
The trouble with charging volume fees for household garbage collection is that people who are unable or unwilling to pay the fees will find alternative methods of disposal, and I don’t mean recycling. There will be garbage everywhere.
Surely it’s a lot slower and more expensive to pick up garbage piece by piece from roadsides than to simply empty garbage cans. In the meantime, it smells bad, and undoubtedly isn’t healthy for those of us who walk or bike or wait for buses amidst piles of rotting garbage.
In other words, steep user fees for household garbage collection are bad public policy.
posted by Larry Kestenbaum on August 27th, 2004 at 7:08 amI don’t think that people in households with more people necessarily consume the least - or the most. I do know that my house of four people fills substantially less than one garbage bag every week. The house next door with four people - at least two full cans every week. How many free garbage cans should each household have? How about creating less trash? This city has an amazing “free” recycling program, and it should be hard for a household of five adults to create more than 62 gallons(!) of unrecyclable waste (per week!). That’s more than 12 gallons each. I’m sure that used kleenexes can’t take up that much space.
posted by amy on August 27th, 2004 at 9:50 amLarry, what about steep user fees for garbage volume balanced out by payments for correctly prepared recyclables? Charge people for garbage, but give credits for glass, paper, plastic, compostables, ReUse Center dropoffs. Every Michigander twitches when forced to throw away an aluminum can in a state with no deposit…
Though you’d have to have some sort of cash redemption for the recoverable materials (not just credit towards property taxes) in order to get the full effect.
posted by Murph on August 27th, 2004 at 11:08 amI think that the dumping problem that Larry describes could be solved by declaring a “large pick-up day” periodically and doing that for free, or doing free scheduled hauling of large items. My city does that, and it works well.
When people know that “large pick-up day” is coming, they go through their basement for things that they might be tempted to dump roadside, like old furniture. It works well for dumpster divers, because they cruise around the night before large-pick-up day and salvage everything salvageable, which lowers costs for the city. When people are moving and leaving behind a huge amount of stuff, they can call for a large pick-up, and that way stuff doesn’t get left when the move does not correspond to an already scheduled large pick-up.
P.S. Murph is right; I lived in PA for a while in between my AA stints and I had to FORCE myself to toss soda cans.
posted by Anna on August 27th, 2004 at 12:36 pm