Trashing Market Forces

When Rivrdog wrote the day before he came home from his nearly month-long vacation to Mexico and then Arizona, he posted on life in the desert for the uninitiated is here.

One of the things I read in there set me off on a tangent that I hadn’t been to for quite some time. As you probably know, Seattle was the first major city in the nation to pass a mandatory recycling program. And as you probably also know, I work for one of the largest trash haulers in the country at their Seattle operations facility. I made sure to distance myself from Seattle Residential pick-ups quite some time ago as I knew they’d do something I considered stupid and I didn’t want to wait until then to make my move, so the majority of my work is done for our other contracts in the towns surrounding area. But I do work closely enough with the Seattle folks to be able to give out the following info and then make some comments afterwards.

Drivers at my facility are tasked with being the “recycling monitor fleet” for half of the City of Seattle. Our competitor has the other half of the city to monitor. If someone has too many recyclables in their trash, my drivers are required to fill out a tag that explains this and affix it to the trash can. Unlike what some national columnists and commentators have written and said, the drivers themselves do not write the citations or issue fines. This is mostly because the drivers themselves couldn’t give a rat’s ass as to what is actually in the can. The faster they are able to dump the cans, the faster they can get done and go home. 

The person whose trash is “too clean” gets their account number written on the bottom, tear-off, portion of the tags and these are turned in at the end of every day. This makes the driver’s day longer and is a PITA.  The city then tracks the ‘too clean trash’ and sends out notices and citations. 

The drivers are also on the hook for the ‘too clean trash’. The city has a couple dozen  “Inspectors” who go around and look into the trash cans for recycleables. If they see one, they will (and have) lain in wait for the driver to see if he picks it up. If he does, he will get written up by the inspector and the driver’s boss is informed. If the same driver picks up too many ‘cans in violation’, the company is fined and the driver can be reprimanded and even fired for too many ‘violations’.

So now, not only do the guys have to deal with the smells, they have city officials setting traps for them that could cost them their jobs. Sounds like fun, huh?

And now, onto my idea as to why the City of Seattle is even dumber than we all thought:

Rivrdog wrote,

Tired of mandatory recycling? Tired of $30/month garbage bills for one can per week? Try voluntary recycling, $13/month for TWICE A WEEK PICKUP! Without a huge overhead for administration and all the cumbersome, envirowhacko-driven laws, it’s really that cheap.

As soon as the idea for this ‘mandatory recycling’ started getting bandied about, I wrote up an email for my boss to take to the city officials who consulted with the two trash service contractors on this. I have some doubt as to whether it ever made it as I’m considered to be too honest for my own damn good and do not keep my opinions to myself, and therefore have pissed management off one too many times. And even if it did make it, from what I have heard from his personal assistant who attended some of these meetings, the city was pretty much set on the mandatory plan and was just going through the motions with us.

Anyway, here is the plan:

Everyone gets a 32 gallon can for their trash and are charged $20 per month for once a week pickup. They also get a 96 gallon can for their recyclables, which also gets picked up every week, but is free since the city actually gets money back from the recycled materials.

If the people have more than 32 gallons of trash, they can either set their bags outside the can or order another can, which they would pay $1 a month for rent on. Either way, they would pay $30 for every 30-32 gallons of trash they had extra.

The extras charges would help fill the gap between the normal trash rates and the cost to pick it up as well as discourage “wasteful” tossing of recyclable material the city can make money from.

Yes, large households could be penalized for the number of people they contain, but the city is already charging what most folks consider exorbitant rates for just the standard weekly pick-up, PLUS any extras ove the 32 gallon can, AND for the recycling pick-up as well, so I’m positive that even with one can extra a week, the large households would see a cut in their trash bills while the city saw an increase in their revenue from the recyclables.

Part of the reason for the high costs to pick-up trash compared to Rivrdog’s Arizona example is that Washington keeps very little of their own trash. We have the odd landfill here and there, but we ship most of it out of state and when you turn anything into freight, you have to pay to ship it. There is a large hole in the ground in Oregon and another in Montana that I know we ship most of our trash to. so we’re talking a 300 mile trip to one place and a 600 mile trip to the other, via rail.

Not cheap.

But the extras charges would probably cover the shipping costs as well as the pick-up costs. Maybe an extra $5 a month would have to be added to the standard 32 gallon can.

The recyclable materials are processed for sale locally and then the buyer for the materials pays for any transport to their facility. Just an FYI, the box your new TV, DVD player and/or game system cane in, was probably made out of materials shipped from the west coast to processing plants in Japan or Taiwan. The vast majority of collected west coast cardboard goes across the Pacific to be reused for shipping their products here. Think about it: they’re both islands. How many trees can they possibly have. They don’t write all kinds of junk about “This Box is 90% Recycled Material” all over the box because that means ink, which costs money. And they don’t care about “Recyclistas” who shop according to recycling labels.

So there you have it. The plan that was offered to the City of Seattle but never acted upon. Instead, they chose to force “Mandatory Recycling” upon their subjects. I am so glad I got out of that town last week.

On a side note: Other than fines, the city hasn’t been able to figure out what they’re going to do to folks who won’t “clean up their trash”. And they haven’t figured out what they’re going to do against people who don’t pay the fines.

I’m sure they would like to snatch houses away from the “Non-Recyclers”, but the bad PR from doing so would be a 2-ton shit-hammer they don’t want to deal with.

Also, if you want to know a secret on how to foil the inspectors; double bag your trash in large black plastic bags. As of now, the inspectors cannot rip open those bags to inspect the contents, so as long as the rattle of those aluminum cans and the clinking of the glass bottles isn’t too loud, you’re good to go.

Good luck and good day.