So in Seattle, your trash can get a ticket.
If your trash contains more than 10% of food or recyclable materials, by volume, then someone will put a sign on it, you'll get a notice from the city on your garbage bill and you'll get an extra dollar tacked onto said bill for every offense. If Seattle has weekly trash pickups, that could mean an extra $8 or $10 on your bill every other month, I presume. Seattle bills bimonthly.
Now, I recycle as I am able. Plastic bottles for certain, since plastic has an excellent turnover rate into new useful configurations. The stain-resistant carpet in my house has a significant percentage of plastic in its fiber. A couple of ladies at the church cut plastic shopping bags into strips and weave them into mats we can donate to homeless shelters. We also gather up aluminum and other metals to take to a nearby metal yard.
But there gets to be a point where the recycling bug is just plain dumb, and Seattle has put that point farther back in the rearview mirror than Lubbock, Texas. For one, no extra steps of measuring or assessing the trash will be taken by the city garbage collectors, who will themselves receive no extra training in how they might judge the division of the average load of trash. As Kevin Williamson explains at National Review, this would be like trying to not only guess how many jelly beans are in a jar but also determine what percentage of them are of a particular flavor. He doesn't note an extra burden -- imagine that jar was not transparent but Hefty-bag opaque so you couldn't tell if someone had slipped a volume-hogging Butterfinger into the midst of the jelly beans. We will now pause for a moment while we all savor the thought of a Butterfinger/jelly bean hybrid snack.
Back to the mockery: The idea of a $1 per violation fine is insulting, as it is meant to do no more than nag Seattle residents. Traffic fines are stiff in order to convince speeders to slow down. Fines for other crimes help recover the costs of prosecuting the offenders, remove ill-gotten gains from those who got them illy and send a warning message to others contemplating the same transgression. But a $1 per offense fine is just trolling people who don't meet the standards Seattle bureaucrats have set for their garbage. It's the same as a restaurant server deliberately getting a difficult customer's order wrong just to set them off.
The move is supposed to help Seattle hit its goal of recycling 60 percent of its trash, getting it over the 56-percent hump it's apparently been stuck on for some time. If the city and its residents were serious about reaching that mark, then they would hire people to separate the trash when it comes in, or design some kind of sorting system in place at its landfills. But that would cost a lot of money, and when it comes to money, the good folk of Seattle don't believe in just throwing it away.
It's a way of increasing the cost of having garbage hauled away for the residents without coming out and saying "We're raising your rates." They'd probably get better compliance and better results if they just raised everyone's cost by a buck.
ReplyDeleteAnd I say this as someone facing a 40% (!) increase in her water bills over the next three years.
Recycling here, except for things like cardboard and aluminum, is pretty inconvenient.