But it’s fisking time!
From yesterday’s Seattle Post Intelligencer Editorial Board on the implementation of Seattle’s forced recycling program,
In Seattle, the power of the law is now on the side of right and recycling. The possibility of a little pain could lead to a lot of gain.
The ‘possibile pain’ is a $50 fine for having too many recyclables in your trash bin. How in the hell can that be ‘right’?
The only gain that is available is for the city’s status in the Top Ten recycling cities in the country. And for that, they are willing to point every ounce of the city’s legal might at the private property owner to make sure they separate their newspaper from their trash.
With the New Year, Seattle began enforcing a 2003 ordinance that mandates recycling a variety of items rather than tossing them in the garbage.
I hope that property owners didn’t toss out the guide that the city sent out. If they did, I hope they put it in their recycle toter and no the trash. It looked just like the rest of the junk mail people around here get on Wednesdays, which was the day most of them showed up, so it wouldn’t surprise me if most folks just tossed it.
City garbage handlers will refuse to pick up trash that obviously has large amounts of paper, milk cartons or other materials that could be recycled.
Because if we do pick up a trash can with too many recyclables in it, we can be fined for doing so. You won’t hear that in any news report current on the wires, but we get hit for anywhere between $50 and $200 for each one and if we get too many, we can lose ourt contract.
There are city employees whose job it is to inspect trash cans for recyclables and they are allowed to hide and wait for us to roll up to that can and see if we pick it up. They are also armed with cameras that record the act for evidence in case we try to fight the fine.
The city can fine commercial and business customers for repeated offenses.
And singe occupant residences. I wonder how many fines you are allowed until they can take your house?
It was hard to be enthusiastic about the idea originally.
A total lie. The Seattle PI has been plugging this program since it was thought up.
But Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels and the City Council have implemented the plan reasonably, allowing more than a year before starting any penalties and using the time for education.
Yes, remember that word ‘Education’. If you think about it, a 50yr old doesn’t get ‘educated’ about recycling, they get ‘Re-educated’ by the city on the ‘proper’ way to separate their trash and recyclables.
Even now, collectors won’t go looking for problems at households.
No, they’re going to start with those least able to control a problem, apartment building owners. If a tenant decides to say “screw it, I’m not gonna listen to the city� guess who gets the fine, yep, the building owner.
Owners complained that they were going to have to turn into trash box wardens every day before their pick up date to make sure the can is full of only trash.
Or pay someone else to do it.
And there’s no reason that Seattle, originally a national leader, should remain more or less stuck recycling only about 40 percent of its waste.
Yes, there is. Because people don’t give a rat’s ass and they shouldn’t be made to either. This whole law is some sort of pissing contest that Seattle hangs their pride on.
How about being the first large city to legislate open carry? That would be a worthwhile endeavor. I bet our crime stats would drop drastically too.
But no, they go in the opposite direction with Forced Recycling (aka Recycle or Die!)
The city’s ambitious goal is to reach a 60 percent rate of recycling by 2010. Since the city has to ship waste out of the area by rail, the change will save money for everyone.
No, it won’t. We ship the recyclables 50 miles up to a plant in Woodinville for final sorting. We then ship the bales of various products to processing plants to be reused. This all costs the taxpayer as part of the pick up fee.
Oh, they forgot to mention that part too, didn’t they?
They are charging residents for the privilege of mandatory curbside pick up of their recyclables. You know those aluminum cans you can get $0.30 a pound for, well if you want the city to pick them up, you’re going to have to pay approximately $0.80 a pound for the pleasure. Hope they like that larger trash bill every month.
Most of the ordinance’s effect is expected to fall on businesses, apartments and townhouses. It has been easier for households to adapt to recycling. But, especially with more development of multifamily residences and business locations, there is a great deal to be gained by nudging cooperation from everyone.
“Nudging�? “Nudging�!?!
How about “Recycle or Leave�. Or how about “We can’t guilt trip you into it and we can’t brainwash your children into guilt tripping you into it, so we’re going to force you into it by making it a law�.
And secondly, this is an urban environment. It wouldn’t surprise me if over a third of the residences north of the stadium and south of the ship canal were multifamily or town homes.
And this what liberals encourage and expect the world to progress into. Yet they now complain when those types of living spaces are the hardest to get to recycle. How about picking your preference and sticking with it?
A greener city will be healthier, safer and more affordable.
More affordable? Seattle is in the top ten highest places to live on the West Coast. Hell, at times, we move into the top five. How the hell is recycling going to make it any cheaper to live here when we are now charging an extra fee to pick up the stuff?
Good lordy, I got stuck in the middle of this after I switched to working for my current employer. This started out as one big mess and hasn’t gotten much better in this last year since it was implemented and we’ve been allowed to ‘practice’ guessing who has 10% (the legal limit of recyclables allowed in the trash) and who has 15%%.
Of course, we’ve been wrong most of the time with the city inspectors. Their 10% is more like 5% and ours is more like 15% (because the route goes faster when the drivers don’t have to stop and write a note to place on the can saying that it has too many recyclables in it).
The only shining light was that the route maps were already made and all the accounts were already in the computer. The delivering of the 42,000 new 32 gallon recycle bins we had to deliver to the folks who didn’t already have that service was almost smooth after that.
More when I find it.
I hate recycling as it is currently practiced. No offense to your current metier, AK, but the entire industry only exists by fiat of government.
The technology is available to shred all trash and burn it making little air pollution, and some ash, which itself is recyclable or at least storable by creating ranges of hills of the stuff on flat land. The ersatz forests of poplar trees love to grow in the ash/soil, and said trees are then turned into paper pulp, reducing the pressure on native softwoods.
We have a large municipal trash incinerator in the Valley at Woodburn, and it has operated for 25 years without difficulty. On really bad inversion days, they store the trash and burn it later.
The whole business is full of big people taking advantage of little people.
In Gresham, OR, I am forced to sort my own recyclables (if I want to recycle at all, it’s not mandatory here yet). So I put MY labor value into the recyclables enriching the recycling company and the gummint, when then has a hidden tax on me (illegal under Oregon law, all taxes and fees must be properly identified as such), thereby being forced (I’m sure this is against the 14th Amendment) to do productive work for someone else (the recycle company and/or the gummint).
The gummint will eventually make recycling mandatory here. When they do, if they keep the current model of citizen-sorting, I WILL sue/ and/or get an initiative going to protect the 14th amendment.
They threw the residents of SEA a bone, at least: you get a large 60 gallon recycle bin into which you throw ALL recyclables, no sorting required. I could probably learn to do that, since at that point separating the wet garbage becomes a simple exception to recycling.
BTW, your SEA system is exactly like that of Washington, DC during my youth (55 years ago). They had wet garbage and trash pickup. You separated and kept two cans, mostly a large can for the trash and a 20-gallon for the wet garbage. There weren’t any plastic bags then, so you had to line your wet garbage can with newspaper. Whew! talk about your dirty job!