Of course, most of my neighbors don't recycle as far as I can see from the curb.
Mandatory weekly single-stream recycling. Goes in giant city-supplied bins. You can use whatever trash can(s) you want, though, so... I dunno, people do okay.
4: "Mandatory" how? Like, you have to wear a Yankees hat all week if you get too drunk and forget?
No special incentive, but it works pretty well. But here was our private "shame" from some years back when it first started. Our driveway comes off of a "lane" which services one other house and goes very close by our garage. A small satellite garbage truck goes up it (and various other small lanes in the area). That is where we always put our trash out, and when we got our recycling bin we put it there as well. It was only a couple of years in that we figured out that the small truck had no separation area it just got thrown in together. So now we put it out at the curb by the main road (and collect it by the back door which is more convenient anyway).
I confess; I put that envelope five dollars under that garbage.
5: they tow ya cah from hahvahd guy.
No I dunno. Perhaps a fine?
Everybody recycles in this blue-collar neighborhood. Blue bags for cans, plastic, and glass, a bin for cardboard, and separate free pickups for tree trimmings (Monday), electronics, and very large items like furniture.
Lucky town has extra special corporate and rich property tax income and provides nice services.
In my complex I have to pool my recycling with everyone else's, and it seems that I am surrounded by morons who think literally any form of plastic, paper or cardboard is recyclable. We can only assume that all the recycling goes straight in with the rest of the garbage.
We have a bin for glass and plastic, and a box for paper and card. There are 4 or 5 dumps around the city where you can bring big stuff and they sort it for you, and they have special vegetation collections at key times of the year. Everything else goes in the general bin unless you want to make a minimal effort: there are a wide range of recycling bins in every supermarket car park, for instance, cans, fabrics, off-beat plastics, etc.
The OPs system sounds similar to the one where I lived in Belgium, last year. Sanitation workers would only remove stuff in official bags issued by the local authority, purchasable in grocery stores and corner shops.
The blue ones were for general rubbish, and 10€ for 10. Then there were yellow ones for recycling, at 1.5€ for 10, and white, biodegradable sacks for biodegradable waste that were similarly cheap.
And in Germany, you take your glass and plastic bottles and aluminium cans to the grocery store, chuck them in a machine, and it gives you a receipt redeemable for cash or rebate at the till. What the machine, won't take, you recycle, and what you can't recycle, you bin.
Council provides bins/bags for food, paper/card and glass/plastic. Other waste you have to provide your own bin. Both collected once a week.
7: I can no longer be silent about this spurious and harmful rumor.
Everyone told me I could park my car in Harvard yard. Whenever the subject of Boston or Bostonians came up, invariably someone made a reference to parking one's car there.
When I finally got to Cambridge, I was in for a rude surprise: you are not allowed to park your car in Harvard Yard. If you do, it will be towed.
Even if you are in compliance with the recycling policy.
I don't understand how milk cartons are recyclable. They are made of polyethylene-coated paperboard, with an added spout made of another kind of plastic. We are supposed to add them in with our mixed-stream recycling, but I am hesitant. How exactly are they separating out those three different materials?
16: Recycling is a hoax, like global warming. All this time they've just been chucking everything in the ocean.
We just went to single stream recycling, which is pretty awesome. And earlier this year, the rules were changed so that if you don't put your recycling bin out, they won't take your trash (which must go in a city-supplied trash can).
Our recycling goes in small, blue plastic bags that were used to carry groceries home. They are so small and thin that the neighbors can see roughly what our financial status was over the previous two weeks by looking at the brands.
All recycling goes into a giant blue roll-out bin that they pick up curbside every other week (which means if you miss a week, you have to cram a full month's worth of recyclables into it). Yard waste goes in a third rollout bin that gets picked up weekly for an extra $60 annual fee.
Is Comeblowus the last place on earth, where we still have to pay for curb-side recycling?
We have single stream recycling, but they don't accept glass. I used to bring the glass to one place that accepted it, but it was always overflowing with glass so I'm not sure if they ever emptied it. Then they established another bin near me that was emptied regularly, but the neighbors complained that people tossed glass in there too late at night and they removed the bin. So now I've given up on glass.
if you don't put your recycling bin out, they won't take your trash
That might be how it works here? I have not put it to the test.
Annoyingly, the city gave us two giant blue bins for our house but our landlords, I guess failing to understand how anybody could make that much recycling, managed to give one of them back somehow. There is also somebody in our building who really doesn't get what should go in the recycling bin. (Trash bags full of styrofoam? Nnnnno.)
Single stream weekly recycling in a large blue bin, nonrecyclables go in the brown bin which is smaller (but still pretty big). No more than one brown bin per household without some kind of hefty fine (I think? It's never come up for me). There's a big green bin for yard waste only.
The City has been encouraging people to recycle more stuff, as in pretty much all plastic and cardboard. I don't know how this works, but the message is clearly designed to have people be overinclusive in what goes in the blue bin.
No more than one brown bin per household without some kind of hefty fine
We can put out pretty much anything and they'll take it with the trash unless it looks chemically. Couches and things go with the regular trash.
23 last -- I swear the City says it's OK to recycle styrofoam peanuts here. [looking it up] It is recyclable! How this works I don't know.
There's a place you can take packing peanuts, but not as part of the curbside program. I found our NO list:
No TRASH
No PLASTIC BAGS
No STYROFOAM
No FOOD WASTE
No Ceramics, Dishes or Glassware
No Clothes Hangers
No Electronics or Appliances
No Houseold Hazardous Waste
No LIght Bulbs
No Paint Containers
No Paper Towels or Napkins
No Photographs or Blueprints
No Pots, Pans or Scrap Metal
No Plastic Utensils
No VCR or Cassette Tapes
No Windows, Plate Glass or MIrrors
No Yard Waste
Please to note NO WIRE HANGERS.
23: CA's clueless neighbor, with whom he shares outdoor recycling bins, threw in a giant plastic bag of *batteries.*
On the other hand we live a short walk from the actual DPW recycling facility so we can take basically whatever the fuck we want over there to be recycled (plastic shopping bags, packing peanuts, scrap metal should we accumulate any).
21 was actually a serious question, so maybe I should try asking asking again more clearly.
In Columbus, Ohio, people pay $8.25 a month to have a company pick up recycling once a week. People can choose to not recycle and throw everything in the trash and pay nothing.
Is there anybody else out there with a similar set up?
Actually this is in the process of changing -- by some point in 2013 there is supposed to be free curbside recycling!
30: I had a similar set up when I lived in Columbus, OH.
Looks like wire hangers and pretty much all plastics are recyclable here. Plus the weather is nice.
We only have yard waste pick-up twice a year, so a great deal of it goes to the dump. That doesn't seem very efficient.
Three separate containers: one for general trash, one for recycling, and one for composting.
As far as charging $3 a bag for landfill-bound trash, doesn't that increse the amount of illegal dumping. It's a huge problem around here. I'm not sure I'd want to see what happens when you give an asshole a financial incentive to be an asshole.
30: We pay half that, but we do pay. I'd say 40% of the people on our block do recycle. Recycling is once a week, unsorted in a bin at the front curb. Trash pickup is twice a week through the back alley. There are yard waste pickups twice a spring and twice a fall, I think, plus something for Christmas trees.
No, wire hangers you take downstairs to the dry cleaner.
A blue bin for single stream recycling, a black bin for trash, both collected weekly on the same day, both free (well, supprted by real estate tax base). Yard stuff in a green bin, also picked up weekly in season, also free. Leaves picked up by the really cool enormous vacuum cleaner from the fronts of homes in season. Theoretical fines for putting recyclables in the trash, probably never enforced.
My township used to use private garbage haulers. Lat year they unprivatized, combining with another small town to make a public department, which has resulted in lower costs to the towns and better service. Yay public sector!
We have recycling - paper, card, plastic bottles, did tins and aluminium cans - taken once a fortnight, and other rubbish taken the other week. No incentive other than not having your rubbish overflowing. They will also take batteries if you put them in a clear bag on top, but I usually forget so just take them with me when I take the glass and tetra paks/cartons to a recycling place. If they would take glass and cartons at the kerb I would be very happy. You can buy an extra bin for garden waste, and they take it fortnightly for free.
Aside from the normal recycling materials, we can put in the big blue bin: any kind of paper, plastic toys with no wires, plastic buckets with no metal handles, all-plastic lawn furniture, milk/OJ/chicken broth cartons, and juice boxes.
I have a chute in the hallway for trash, but have to go down to the garage to recycle, which has one for paper and another for glass and plastic.
I still haven't figured out what day of the week pickup is - I don't have to take anything out, granted, but you'd think I could learn from walking down the street. Apparently not.
37: Thanks, Thorn! I didn't think Columbus could be that unique in its backwardness.
I think about 40% of my neighbors recycle too -- but we live in a hippy-dippy neighborhood. The percent of people recycling in the city overall is much lower.
Ours is like Unimaginative and Apo's above.
I'd love to live somewhere that accepted composting. I don't really want to garden or to take on more projects, but there's a lot of coffee grounds/egg shells/banana peels in our trash.
44: Is Figlio's still good? We used to go there all the time.
45: You could just throw them in a pile somewhere hidden in your yard. I think about doing that. Is it a bad idea?
I throw uncooked vegetable waste like banana peels or carrot greens or broccoli stems in our yard waste bin.
No, that's a compost heap. It's not ideal in terms of producing useful compost for gardening with, but for compostable waste disposal, there's not a thing wrong with just digging a hole, throwing your compostable waste in it, and throwing a shovelful of dirt on top every so often to keep the flies off and the smell down. In the realm of the amount of compost a small family produces, that shouldn't be a problem at all.
What's the advantage of doing that? It will decompose in a landfill, too.
I thought things didn't compose in a landfill because they were buried too deep or something.
50: Not all of us have these fancy "garbage collectors."
46: Sadly, I don't know. We haven't been there in a long time. We just don't get out much anymore. It used to be one of our favorites.
Looking at their web-site I see that they now have 2 restaurants in Columbus and one in Dayton.
51: I guess that makes sense. They're probably compacted along the way and air can't get in there.
51: There are many reasons why they never compose in a landfill. For one, most of them lack a composer's genius in the first place.
Two of my neighbors had a compost bin fight. The fight can be boiled down to:
Person 1: "We're working to improve the earth by composting and you must be evil to oppose us doing so."
Person 2: "If the compost bin is so great, why don't you put it in your own yard."
They keep improving our recycling here. I think we are going to single stream soon, and now we have curbside hazardous waste pick-up (have had curbside battery pick-up forever). We can recycle virtually everything -- all the plastics, all the metals, glass, office paper, newspaper, cardboard, etc. Yard waste has to go in a biodegradable bag now. Fee for a big garbage can is $7/month, recycling earns you a $4/month credit. (This is in addition to the baseline fee. It's a little harder to see the incentive, as garbage fees are all rolled into your overall city bill, which includes water and runoff fees, so for instance, my bill is usually around $80 all told.)
53: Don't go to Dayton to have dinner on my account.
51: Less transport hassle/cost/energy use to walk it to your backyard than to have the garbage truck drive it to the landfill. Also, it's useful sorting: in your back yard compost decomposes and makes dirt. In a landfill, maybe it decomposes, but it doesn't make useful dirt, it just makes the non-biodegradable trash dirty.
What's the advantage of doing that? It will decompose in a landfill, too.
59 starts to get at this, but even assuming it decomposes (questionable for the reason given in 51), things that decompose don't just disappear. So it would still be filling up the landfill. Digging a giant hole in the ground and then filling it half with dirt and half with non-decomposable items is wasteful. You'd have been better digging half as big a whole and filling it just with non-decomposable items, or putting twice as many non-decomposable items into your big hole. Now that your hole is full, you're going to have to go dig another.
Do you all bury your decomposables? Or compost?
No, I'm in an apartment with noplace reasonable to take them. I had a compost heap at MIT (well, I was compost chairperson for a year, an important administrative task involving shoveling), and talked my parents into one at their LI house.
Urple is also right about wasting the landfill space.
We compost, although we're a bit half-assed about it, both in the "making-sure-decomposable-things-go-in-the-compost-pile-instead-of-the-trash" part and in the "making-the-compost-pile-actually-turn-into-compost" part.
The previous sanitation guy for my town was not a big proponent of recycling. My building wanted to get an extra recyling barrel, but he wanted to charge $300/year. We got a new, younger guy who is much keener on recycling. Now they pick up every week instead of every other week, and if you don't put out any recycling at all, they won't pick up your trash.
Compost heaps in the yard have the advantage of "maybe you will accidentally grow some really awesome squash." I don't think that works so well with the landfill.
We discontinued backyard food waste composting when a family of coons moved into the neighborhood. Yes, I am a racist.
Our area's been discussed already; yay single-stream! The surprise for me when it was introduced was that pizza boxes were officially declared recyclable.
I assume the drive for single-stream isn't just about making it easier to recycle. My suspicion is that people were pretty bad about separating paper and containers (the previous system), so there was a lot of back-end sorting going on anyway. If you have to do that sorting anyway, you might as well make it easy for people to put something into that stream, and perhaps liberalize what goes in if you're going to check and throw out the truly nasty pizza boxes.
I've never lived anywhere that was pay-per-throw, although when I lived in an office park the container recycling was public and curbside, but the trash and paper recycling was managed by the landlord.
I still wish there was a better option for recycling used batteries and fluorescent bulbs than simply throwing them at passing cars.
You might try Home Depot for the flourescent bulbs.
At our Home Depot, there is a box at the front were you can put bulbs and they will throw them at cars for you/
Yeah, Home Depot has entire parking lots full of stationary cars to throw them at.
Throwing batteries at stationary cars is unsporting.
I bought a big plastic bin with a lid and throw my kitchen scraps in there. It gets bugs and worms, and maybe it only looks like dirt because there are so many coffee grounds in it. But, twice a year I empty it into my garden plot and the whole thing seems to work. The raccoons never got in it; they are satisfied with coming into the house and leaving magnets on my fridge.
Sacramento has (and is phasing out) the best yardwaste system EVER. You throw as much yard waste as you want into the street. Downed trees, many cubic feet of leaves, any amount of yard waste. Weekly, a truck and The Claw drive by. The Claw scoops the yard waste into the truck and we all rejoice. I absolutely love it.
Apparently it is expensive and cyclists don't like the street piles and it gets leaves in the storm drains. None of that bothers me as much as I love to watch The Claw, but I understand the reasons they are phasing it out. I think they'll still still use The Claw in the fall when the leaves drop in stunning amounts.
Heebie U got paper recycling one year ago. I don't think the town itself has any recycling system. I was hauling my paper home from work to dump it in the recycling bin.
I don't think my kitchen waste system is a true compost pile because my garden got a lot of volunteer squashes this year. I think a true compost pile would have gotten rid of those. But, the garden plot is thriving and I have no end blossom rot (calcium deficiency) and some bonus pumpkins.
I think they'll still still use The Claw in the fall when the leaves drop in stunning amounts.
I bet they switch to vacuum cleaners. Everybody seems to eventually.
Fresno, CA is also pretty good at recycling. In the early 2000s, we had standard garbage can + 3 totable bins (1 paper, 1 can/glass recycling, 1 green waste). Lots of complaints about people not wanting to spend their time sorting when they take their recycling out, not wanting 5 garbage cans in the house etc.
In 2007 or so, we went to a system where every house gets 3 rolling 45 gallon garbage cans. One is green and takes compost, yard clippings, etc. The second is blue and takes essentially everything but styrofoam and food contaminated waste. The last is grey and takes non-recyclable waste. The service is provided by the city.
You can call the City and downgrade the side of your black can. If you do so, there is a small reduction to your monthly fee. Our bills are combined: one check to the city covers water + sewer + garbage collection.
Oh--much like Megan mentions above, one day per year [staggered], we have big trash day where they come by and scoop up anything that's cut 4' square or smaller that you stack in front of your house. People dump old furniture, broken up concrete, and much else.
MooseKing, my goodness! Hi! How've you been?
(I know you better by the handle in your email address but I'll call you MooseKing here.)
Heebie U got paper recycling one year ago.
Even in the dorms?
(Is there still going to be an unfoggedecadecon? I am supposed to fight a duel for Matt Damon's, er, dishonor with J Robot and I need to know whether to practice dramatically flourishing a pistol/write a will.)
Megan> Very well! I've been watching to see if there are any exciting water developments. Anything exciting? [More importantly: OPR's still okay--just backburnered, right? Or was there some big thing that I missed?]
That's a firm maybe. I'm not actively planning anything, but I think maybe heebie is? I have a vague belief that it's likely to end up in North Carolina?
||
Very quick ATM.
Consultants from a big company coming in for an on-side visit. We're the ones paying them. Before the meeting we're going out for a quick economical large lunch. Nobody in the meeting is high-ranking. Would it still be polite to offer to pick up the check, since they're the ones coming here?
|>
And if their billing makes sense, you should be paying for it either way, so paying upfront is both nice and saves admin overhead.
OtPR is fine, just backburnered. It was an exciting year around here, with the new fellow and setting up house and all, and there never seemed to be time to write abstract pieces on water stuff.
88: Megan, I'm very glad to hear that. And congratulations on the guy!
I'm now commuting to the peninsula each week to work as an in city plan checker.
Here in Schmancy Heights OH we have (a) regular trash, (b) mixed paper and cardboard, (c) mixed other recycling. Apartments and condos have their own setup with dumpsters for all that, as you'd expect.
If you are in a single-family dwelling, you buy your own trash cans for (a), get special blue bins from the city for (c), and put (b) in paper bags or bundle it up with string. And then! -- this is the exiting part -- you put all this in front of your garage, away from the street, and a little bitty garbage picker truck drives down your driveway to pick it up and ferry it to a larger truck, so no one ever has to SEE your shameful leavings.
I call this setup the "special trash" and am voting YES on the property tax hike that will preserve it (along with some rather more important services) for the future. Save our special trash heritage!
Sifu, have your big blue bins cracked? Ours have cracks running around the bar where the truck lifts it up, running down to the bottom. One of the bins is very close to the point where it will snap in half the next time the truck tries to lift it- I put duct tape around it which might extend the life a couple runs, but it's not going to last much longer. Can you go to the DPW and get me a new bin?
85: It could always be worse: A friend of mine once got inveigled into pretending to be a big shot in order to impress some foreign clients of one of his other acquaintances. So they're wrapping up the moderately fancy meal, and it slowly begins to dawn on him that what's next on the program is that he is supposed to hook up the foreigners with some prostitutes to take back to the hotel. It was at that point that he brought the charade to a discreet end.
I have large bins here by the Bay. One landfill, one compost, one single-stream recycling. It is extreme overkill - I Live alone cant come close to producinng 38 gallons of waste a week period, let alone 3 times 38. Service costs around $30/month.
A set of bins were here when I moved in, but when I switched service over to my name, they brought a second set of them. Then they were confused for a few weeks, not taking them back, so my kitchen was a sea of trashcans for most of the first month I lived here.
The other recycling hassle is that I live in... call it a very urban environment. Homeless folks know when trash night is and scavenge through the recycling. Most of them are OK about it, but some folks just scatters stuff all over the street. There is one guy who doesn't make a mess who usually is here waiting - we have a bit of a tacit understanding - but if he isn't out, I tend to end up waiting to take them down right before the truck shows up. Which is ~3AM, which sucks. The truck wakes me up when it comes by anyway, but still.
