8 ms·

Oh let me tell you the story of Worcester, MA. Now Worcester (pronounced woostah) is much smaller than NYC but still nothing tiny. It has city trash pickup but

Oh let me tell you the story of Worcester, MA. Now Worcester (pronounced woostah) is much smaller than NYC but still nothing tiny. It has city trash pickup but instead of taxing its citizens for this service it came up with the ingenious plan to charge people for usage. If you want to throw out some trash what you do is you go to a nearby convenience or liquor store and buy these tiny flimsy yellow bags for a fairly steep price (when I lived there it was nearly $2/bag), and then you just put your garbage in the bags and put it on the curb and it’ll get picked up. This way those who generate more garbage pay more and people would be encouraged to generate less garbage. Genius, right? No, wrong. So wrong. As I’m sure you can already see, it’s far easier to just leave your trash on the street than to take a trip to the city-ordained liquor stores to buy the approved bags. And with the bags being tiny and flimsy you don’t have much of an option for anything larger to get tossed. Got a big pillow? A dirty paint bucket? A 2x4? Just leave that anywhere. It was honestly one of the dirtiest places I’ve ever lived.

chrisandchris 4y ago
Interesting. That's basically how Switzerland works. And we are working quite fine.
rablackburn 4y ago
Interesting, that’s basically the model a lot of Japanese towns use. The difference is, if you leave garbage without the right bag/on the street your neighbours are going to dump it back on your front door. Larger item dumping is still a problem though. Some places issues coupons for a certain number of trips to the dump/year for local residents that can help.
- dilyevsky 4y ago
  Yes a lot of places (particularly in Europe) do this as well. What you do is have outrageous fines for dumping and actually enforce it and voila - no garbage.
  - chmod775 4y ago
    I suspect it has more to do with a sense of ownership and community than any fines. US Americans tend to live in their homes, while in many other places people live in their city. It's a natural consequence of American individualism.
    - isoprophlex 4y ago
      Well maybe, but the fines are just really steep. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: if you leave a trash bag on the street, inspectors will go through the trash to find identifiable information. The fine is 300+ EUR. The system pays for itself. Edit: I looked it up, they've changed it to a three-strike system. 125/250 for the first two; your choice of 500 or 3 days community service (cleaning up litter) on the third strike.
    - dilyevsky 4y ago
      > US Americans tend to live in their homes, while in many other places people live in their city. American cities generally have more of these problems than the burbs so this line of reasoning doesn't work irl. Also you just haven't seen those fines. Doesn't matter what your sense of community is, once dem fines start rolling in you will NOT litter.
      - Dah00n 4y ago
        I'm not OP but I'm pretty sure the argument is that Americans (even in the city) lives less in the city and more in their homes - comparably.
      - nibbleshifter 4y ago
        I think you misunderstood OP. For European city dwellers, "where you live" and a sense of "ownership" extends far beyond the walls of your apartment/home - to incorporate your neighborhood to some extent. For a lot of US folks in cities, this doesn't seem to be the case. At least, that's what I got from the post.
        4y ago
- hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
  Australia has hard rubbish collection for the big stuff - once or twice a year you dump your large items on the curb and they are removed, people salvaging from hard rubbish seems to be a popular pass time too (it’s mostly unwanted furniture / white goods in okay condition, so not as gross as it sounds)
  - lysp 4y ago
    And it's outsourced to recycling companies who get to profit from any valuables they find. Which is why salvaging is discouraged.
- Haga 4y ago
- komali2 4y ago
  Taiwan does this too and as the German poster mentioned, this results in MASSIVE out-of-city illegal dumpsites. It also leads to a cultural quirk where every day at some set time your whole neighborhood stands partly on a corner, partly spilling to a road, waiting for the trash truck to come. Then when it arrives everyone lines up and sets their daily trash bag into the truck. It's an important part of local culture cause all the old people like hanging out and hyucking it up together but I've got a TODO item to map public vehicle / pedestrian collision data against local trash pickup times to see how often scooters or cars are taking out the elderly that are walking into a second lane of traffic because the sidewalk is packed with people holding trash bags and the first lane is taken up by a trash truck. Bonus points if the second lane also had a slow moving trash motorcycle (some kind of separate private trash pickup entity I don't yet understand) that decided to simply park adjacent to the trash truck and directly in traffic. Anyway plus side yeah in Taipei there isn't a rat problem like new york, so I guess in some ways it kinda works, definitely not ideal imo though. I don't think trash bins would work either here though, the alleys are too small, the road system too... improvised.
  - soco 4y ago
    A massive out-of-city dumpster is only possible if the authorities are looking the other way, and this is valid for Taiwan, Germany or Romania just the same. Yes individuals are dumping the garbage but it's the society as a whole accepting it, maybe with minor moaning.
    - komali2 4y ago
      I think you're minimizing here the realities of policing, policy, law, law enforcement, and societal engagement and enforcement of cultural values. There is no country on earth with no crime. All countries on earth thus have authorities looking the other way on crime. All societies on earth are accepting of crime. See the absurdity? Thus I think your post is over generalizing. EDIT: I'm realizing that you might be a person who would make arguments about "personal responsibility" that consider nothing about environment and instead place wholesale blanket judgements on people for situations they find themselves in. Stop me if I'm extrapolating too far and being unfair, but when seeing any overweight person, would you think to yourself, "that person is accepting of their weight" ?
thenoblesunfish 4y ago
That's what they do here in Switzerland, except you put the bags in dedicated dumpsters. The bags have different sizes up to 110 L, and for the big junk problem every couple of months you can throw away anything you can personally carry to a parked garbage truck :D
rjh29 4y ago
In the UK you just pay the council to pick up large items for you, or you drive to the dump. Is that not a thing?
- cfn 4y ago
  In the UK you can drive to the dump and sort yourself the garbage for easier recycling (no fees involved). That is quite a good system. Here, in Portugal, you can dump up to certain weight for free but you end up paying 30-40 Euros for a full van, for example. As a result people just dump garbage anywhere out of sight, specially rubble and other construction garbage. I find it shortsighted as the council then spends a lot of money cleaning up those places.
  - bearmode 4y ago
    In the UK individuals can do that, but often they don't allow commercial vehicles, and you have to pay to dispose of commercial waste
- dazc 4y ago
  But we still have people who will pay £2k for a new TV who will simply not pay £15 to have the old one properly disposed of. Same for fridges, mattresses, sofas, etc. Much easier to drive to a remote location when it's dark and dump it with 99% chance of getting away with it.
- johndunne 4y ago
  Wakefield council, UK, allows 2 pick ups of large items a year. Their website has a form you complete and they tell you when to leave it out. Old couch/fridge/overly opinionated family member, twice a year. Then there's the 3 x 110L wheelie bins for general household/'recycling' and garden waste. Works well for household. We still see fly tipping but its not rat inducing, thankfully.
pipodeclown 4y ago
This is the exact same model plenty of Dutch cities use and this is absolutely not the problem they have. Sounds more like a city cleaning problem than anything to do with waste collection.
rjbwork 4y ago
Taxing desirable behavior. Wonderful idea. As they say, the problem with incentives is that they work. Instead, you should tax the consumption, and pay people who dispose of trash.
InCityDreams 4y ago
Eu country: where i am we sort our stuff. Rotate leaving it out every three weeks on a tuesday glass, paper, plastic, and every two weeks 'regular' rubbish gets put in an RFID'd large bin. The bucketed glass, boxed paper, and plastic in a sack (one hundred each of which cost nothing ie €0.00, we just sign for them at the town hall, or - rather conveniently - a local bar) having been put out on a Monday evening are gone by 0800. These removals all cost about €180pa. The larger bi-weekly bins are generally emptied by 1000, and we are billed by weight. As a single resident i get a hell of a discount on the total year, but i have to use the bin min 4 times a year. I often end up borrowing rubbish from my neighbours, just to keep my numbers up. We also have a local dump for when house cleaning, much stuff, electronics, poisons etc. That's included in the $180 and can be used whenever open, as often as you like and you can stil take plastic, glass and paper there. All i 'miss' is a large-item collection service, that may exist - I've just never asked, as I've never needed it. When the system was introduced, about 15 years ago, people were upset that the big dumpsters were taken away and cats etc would rip open the bags, and the rubbish in the street would be unsightly. I really don't think anyone in the whole city would go back to the dumpster ways (though there are dumpsters strategically around - several many for where tourists are (regularly emptied smaller bins are gathered together).
- archi42 4y ago
  Sounds like our system, maybe different numbers. We can call large item collections for free twice per year. Additional collections incur a small fee, but nothing too expensive. But I know the feeling of being unaware of such details... Renovations and furnishing produces huge amounts of cardboard trash. Took us a half year and many car trips to the local recycling company to realize that our neighbors just put their huge cardboard boxes next to their bin on pick up day! Insert Picard facepalm At least the recycler takes paper/cardboard for free, and is not too far away.
mejutoco 4y ago
Dumpsters could be put and taxed, like in lots of cities around the world. Organizing trash collection is one of the first reasons to have a city council in the first place! I understand it is difficult to raise taxes for this if they were not there in the first place. Aluminum collection, which has some value, could subsidize part of the tax. The other could come from some tax on real estate, since waste is supposedly linked to people (I know in Germany I pay for building trash collection). With such prime real estate, it might be a problem to find the space officially (those trash bags are somewhere outside right now). Idk, maybe rats are part of Gotham city for now.

chrisandchris 4y ago

Interesting. That's basically how Switzerland works. And we are working quite fine.

rablackburn 4y ago

Interesting, that’s basically the model a lot of Japanese towns use. The difference is, if you leave garbage without the right bag/on the street your neighbours are going to dump it back on your front door. Larger item dumping is still a problem though. Some places issues coupons for a certain number of trips to the dump/year for local residents that can help.

dilyevsky 4y ago
Yes a lot of places (particularly in Europe) do this as well. What you do is have outrageous fines for dumping and actually enforce it and voila - no garbage.
- chmod775 4y ago
  I suspect it has more to do with a sense of ownership and community than any fines. US Americans tend to live in their homes, while in many other places people live in their city. It's a natural consequence of American individualism.
  - isoprophlex 4y ago
    Well maybe, but the fines are just really steep. Rotterdam, the Netherlands: if you leave a trash bag on the street, inspectors will go through the trash to find identifiable information. The fine is 300+ EUR. The system pays for itself. Edit: I looked it up, they've changed it to a three-strike system. 125/250 for the first two; your choice of 500 or 3 days community service (cleaning up litter) on the third strike.
  - dilyevsky 4y ago
    > US Americans tend to live in their homes, while in many other places people live in their city. American cities generally have more of these problems than the burbs so this line of reasoning doesn't work irl. Also you just haven't seen those fines. Doesn't matter what your sense of community is, once dem fines start rolling in you will NOT litter.
    - Dah00n 4y ago
      I'm not OP but I'm pretty sure the argument is that Americans (even in the city) lives less in the city and more in their homes - comparably.
    - nibbleshifter 4y ago
      I think you misunderstood OP. For European city dwellers, "where you live" and a sense of "ownership" extends far beyond the walls of your apartment/home - to incorporate your neighborhood to some extent. For a lot of US folks in cities, this doesn't seem to be the case. At least, that's what I got from the post.
      - 4y ago
hsbauauvhabzb 4y ago
Australia has hard rubbish collection for the big stuff - once or twice a year you dump your large items on the curb and they are removed, people salvaging from hard rubbish seems to be a popular pass time too (it’s mostly unwanted furniture / white goods in okay condition, so not as gross as it sounds)
- lysp 4y ago
  And it's outsourced to recycling companies who get to profit from any valuables they find. Which is why salvaging is discouraged.
Haga 4y ago
komali2 4y ago
Taiwan does this too and as the German poster mentioned, this results in MASSIVE out-of-city illegal dumpsites. It also leads to a cultural quirk where every day at some set time your whole neighborhood stands partly on a corner, partly spilling to a road, waiting for the trash truck to come. Then when it arrives everyone lines up and sets their daily trash bag into the truck. It's an important part of local culture cause all the old people like hanging out and hyucking it up together but I've got a TODO item to map public vehicle / pedestrian collision data against local trash pickup times to see how often scooters or cars are taking out the elderly that are walking into a second lane of traffic because the sidewalk is packed with people holding trash bags and the first lane is taken up by a trash truck. Bonus points if the second lane also had a slow moving trash motorcycle (some kind of separate private trash pickup entity I don't yet understand) that decided to simply park adjacent to the trash truck and directly in traffic. Anyway plus side yeah in Taipei there isn't a rat problem like new york, so I guess in some ways it kinda works, definitely not ideal imo though. I don't think trash bins would work either here though, the alleys are too small, the road system too... improvised.
- soco 4y ago
  A massive out-of-city dumpster is only possible if the authorities are looking the other way, and this is valid for Taiwan, Germany or Romania just the same. Yes individuals are dumping the garbage but it's the society as a whole accepting it, maybe with minor moaning.
  - komali2 4y ago
    I think you're minimizing here the realities of policing, policy, law, law enforcement, and societal engagement and enforcement of cultural values. There is no country on earth with no crime. All countries on earth thus have authorities looking the other way on crime. All societies on earth are accepting of crime. See the absurdity? Thus I think your post is over generalizing. EDIT: I'm realizing that you might be a person who would make arguments about "personal responsibility" that consider nothing about environment and instead place wholesale blanket judgements on people for situations they find themselves in. Stop me if I'm extrapolating too far and being unfair, but when seeing any overweight person, would you think to yourself, "that person is accepting of their weight" ?

thenoblesunfish 4y ago

That's what they do here in Switzerland, except you put the bags in dedicated dumpsters. The bags have different sizes up to 110 L, and for the big junk problem every couple of months you can throw away anything you can personally carry to a parked garbage truck :D

rjh29 4y ago

In the UK you just pay the council to pick up large items for you, or you drive to the dump. Is that not a thing?

cfn 4y ago
In the UK you can drive to the dump and sort yourself the garbage for easier recycling (no fees involved). That is quite a good system. Here, in Portugal, you can dump up to certain weight for free but you end up paying 30-40 Euros for a full van, for example. As a result people just dump garbage anywhere out of sight, specially rubble and other construction garbage. I find it shortsighted as the council then spends a lot of money cleaning up those places.
- bearmode 4y ago
  In the UK individuals can do that, but often they don't allow commercial vehicles, and you have to pay to dispose of commercial waste
dazc 4y ago
But we still have people who will pay £2k for a new TV who will simply not pay £15 to have the old one properly disposed of. Same for fridges, mattresses, sofas, etc. Much easier to drive to a remote location when it's dark and dump it with 99% chance of getting away with it.
johndunne 4y ago
Wakefield council, UK, allows 2 pick ups of large items a year. Their website has a form you complete and they tell you when to leave it out. Old couch/fridge/overly opinionated family member, twice a year. Then there's the 3 x 110L wheelie bins for general household/'recycling' and garden waste. Works well for household. We still see fly tipping but its not rat inducing, thankfully.

pipodeclown 4y ago

This is the exact same model plenty of Dutch cities use and this is absolutely not the problem they have. Sounds more like a city cleaning problem than anything to do with waste collection.

rjbwork 4y ago

Taxing desirable behavior. Wonderful idea. As they say, the problem with incentives is that they work. Instead, you should tax the consumption, and pay people who dispose of trash.

InCityDreams 4y ago

Eu country: where i am we sort our stuff. Rotate leaving it out every three weeks on a tuesday glass, paper, plastic, and every two weeks 'regular' rubbish gets put in an RFID'd large bin. The bucketed glass, boxed paper, and plastic in a sack (one hundred each of which cost nothing ie €0.00, we just sign for them at the town hall, or - rather conveniently - a local bar) having been put out on a Monday evening are gone by 0800. These removals all cost about €180pa. The larger bi-weekly bins are generally emptied by 1000, and we are billed by weight. As a single resident i get a hell of a discount on the total year, but i have to use the bin min 4 times a year. I often end up borrowing rubbish from my neighbours, just to keep my numbers up. We also have a local dump for when house cleaning, much stuff, electronics, poisons etc. That's included in the $180 and can be used whenever open, as often as you like and you can stil take plastic, glass and paper there. All i 'miss' is a large-item collection service, that may exist - I've just never asked, as I've never needed it. When the system was introduced, about 15 years ago, people were upset that the big dumpsters were taken away and cats etc would rip open the bags, and the rubbish in the street would be unsightly. I really don't think anyone in the whole city would go back to the dumpster ways (though there are dumpsters strategically around - several many for where tourists are (regularly emptied smaller bins are gathered together).

archi42 4y ago
Sounds like our system, maybe different numbers. We can call large item collections for free twice per year. Additional collections incur a small fee, but nothing too expensive. But I know the feeling of being unaware of such details... Renovations and furnishing produces huge amounts of cardboard trash. Took us a half year and many car trips to the local recycling company to realize that our neighbors just put their huge cardboard boxes next to their bin on pick up day! Insert Picard facepalm At least the recycler takes paper/cardboard for free, and is not too far away.

mejutoco 4y ago

Dumpsters could be put and taxed, like in lots of cities around the world. Organizing trash collection is one of the first reasons to have a city council in the first place! I understand it is difficult to raise taxes for this if they were not there in the first place. Aluminum collection, which has some value, could subsidize part of the tax. The other could come from some tax on real estate, since waste is supposedly linked to people (I know in Germany I pay for building trash collection). With such prime real estate, it might be a problem to find the space officially (those trash bags are somewhere outside right now). Idk, maybe rats are part of Gotham city for now.