Trash in the time of COVID-19

The City of Burlington does not have trash collection as a service**, ***.  Citizens either contract with a private hauler or haul it themselves.  

I've been hauling trash to the Pine St drop-off for nearly 16 years.  Unfortunately, it's currently closed due to the pandemic, so today I hauled to the Milton drop-off.  This adds a good 40 minutes to the time to haul, and isn't easily combined with a post-haul trip to the grocery store.  So if the Pine St drop-off doesn't reopen, then consolidated collection starts to look better.

The Pine St drop-off is also the only facility in CSWD that weighs your trash, so I have 16 years of collected data on each haul.  For today's haul to Milton, I used our postal scale to measure its total weight of 48lbs spread across two 45-gallon bags and two 45-gallon trash cans.  CSWD is currently charging $10 for four 45-gallon containers, which is almost exactly what it would cost to haul 48lbs at $0.21/lb to Pine St.  So yay for that! but I still hope Pine St reopens within the next few months.

** Yet.  Burlington is considering consolidated collection.  While I support the general idea of reducing environmental impacts through consolidated collection, it is likely to be far more expensive for no added benefit:

• Cost.  We currently haul about 200lbs/yr of trash.  This means that, at the current prices, we are averaging about $40/yr on trash.  That's about the monthly cost for some private haulers.
• Other materials.  I'm glad to see that compost is covered under the proposed plan, but we also sort and haul batteries, books, scrap metal, used clothes and electronics.  If we will need to continue to haul these, that will negate savings we might have seen from not having to spend the time & gas to haul our own trash.

*** This gave rise to a now-amusing anecdote because when we moved to Burlington from out of state, we engaged the services of a buyer broker.  Because they lived in a condominium complex where the association negotiated with a trash hauler, he was unaware until we told him that the City didn't do trash collection.  

Something for the entrepreneurs to think about

Professional trash hauling with bicycles (thanks to Dana for pointing me to this).  Awesome. Burlington has private haulers, so it could probably work here, too.  Landfill Rd is less than 7 miles from downtown, and even closer to UVM.  

Trash on the Lawn Day

Right around the same time I was working on my reducing landfill project, the Burlington Sustainability Action Team (BSAT) was sorting through the trash at City Hall to see how much trash that currently goes into the landfill could be diverted elsewhere.  The Burlington Free Press also reported on the project, and it's rather shocking how this article manages to miss any mention of the BSAT.


I do have a beef with the 7days blog entry, which writes: "Since Burlington City Hall doesn't have a composting program, it would have been impossible for employees to have separated out their compost."  There is nothing stopping employees from bringing a compost bucket, collecting the day's compostables, and setting up a rotation for whose turn it is to take the bucket to the compost project at the end of the day.  At the very least, collect the coffee grounds and any gardeners among the employees should be happy to have them.

Reducing Landfill

Connor now has a bed for his mattress and the box spring was superfluous.  We listed it on freecycle, but got no bites.  It looked like the box spring was headed for the trash dump (we haul our trash to the city drop-off because the drop is about a mile from Finn's school, and it costs about $10-15 less per month than contracting to have it hauled.  more on that another day), and because the trash drop-off charges $0.13 per pound, I was a little grumbly at the thought of paying $4 to dispose of our box spring (I'm wild-assed guessing that the box spring weighs ~30lbs). 

But then I realized, hey, most of the weight in here is untreated wood and metal!  The metal can be dumped for free at the city drop-off in the scrap metal bin, and the untreated wood can be dumped for free at the McNeil generating plant (and I'll be driving by McNeil in order to dump off yard waste at the city compost project soon, anyways).  Woo-hee!  Well... it took almost 20 minutes to disassemble it, which means I "paid myself" roughly $12/hour to do the job.  Not exactly my going rate, but sometimes you just gotta do the "right thing".

Here it is in its component parts.  The random stuff that I had to pay to dump appeared to be <2lbs at the city drop-off:

Taking out the trash

A recent article in Seven Days (the local "indie" paper) reported on the debate over a bill that would add a dollar to the cost of each tire sold in Vermont, which would then go towards the costs of collection and disposal. An opponent of the bill is quoted as complaining about why tires are singled out. “It’s computer stuff, couches, TVs, shopping carts, all kinds of things. Do we now tax a dollar on every TV that’s sold . . . on and on? Or do we try to enforce the current laws?”

Well, actually, putting the costs of collection and disposal up front, when the consumer buys the item, and providing "free" disposal when the consumer wants to throw the item out, makes a whole lot more sense than collecting fees at disposal time and spending money trying to enforce largely unenforceable laws against illegal dumping. Simply take away the "rational" incentive to illegally dump (boy, it's expensive for me to properly dispose of these tires/tvs/etc; I'm just gonna dump 'em in the river/woods and no one will know the difference), and you'll just be left with the vandals (heh-heh, wouldn't it be cool to push a shopping cart down this hill?) to try to catch and prosecute.

The challenge of creating a system in which the costs of collection and disposal are put up front (without creating a more horrible bureaucracy) is left as an exercise to the reader; given the existence of state sales taxes, the collection aspect isn't particularly important. Instead focus on the problems of proper assignment of the cost of disposal for items -- clearly a tire costs more to dispose of than a plastic potato chip bag, but how exactly should you assign costs? (a straight percentage might work; then again, a $40 dvd player probably costs as much to properly dispose of as a $300 one, and a lot more to dispose of than the packaging for $40 worth of organic green tea) -- and the problem of out-of-state and online purchases (solve this latter problem, and you've also solved a similar problem for sales taxes... good luck).