Pay As You Throw

As waste management becomes an increasingly critical problem in the U.S., we’re seeing more and more communities having to get creative about paying for their trash collection (and dumping) services, since not everybody has a convenient canyon they can fill up or a convenient ocean to dump everything into. One of the more pragmatic (or mercenary; it depends on your point of view) schemes we’ve encountered so far is the “pay as you throw” or PAYT program: the city will only collect garbage if you put it in approved trash bags (usually a special color and/or marked with the city’s logo), which you are required to purchase at the supermarket for a dollar or two. The idea is that this way you are only paying for the amount of garbage collection service you actually use, and the city does not have to take the waste management fees out of their (already scarce) property taxes. Which is okay, as long as you’re not the store that gets stuck with selling the bags…

A story which turned up in the Concord Monitor online site notes that stores which carry the PAYT bags do not receive any payment for doing so; all of the money is sent to the company in South Carolina which manufactures the bags, which in turn shares some of the funds directly with the city using the PAYT program. Meanwhile, the stores have to pay for the costs associated with stocking and selling this “product” for free – and at a loss, in fact, if the customer pays for the bags with a credit card. According to the article linked above, some of the stores in Concord (and some of the other communities using this system, apparently) are refusing to carry the bags. The store managers say that the minor loss in public relations is more than offset by the money they are saving by not carrying this product in the first place…

Here in East Lansing there’s a similar system in operation, but it’s a hybrid that I think works a lot better. All homeowners in the City of East Lansing are issued one (1) large (64-gallon) rolling garbage can and one (1) smaller blue tote bucket (around 15 gallons) for recycling by the city. If you need to throw away additional waste, you can purchase 20-gallon plastic PAYT bags in a package of 5 for $5 at most grocery stores; if you need to throw away extra yard waste (leafs, lawn clippings) you can purchase brown paper bags, also about 20 gallons, also at 5 for $5. Most of the funding for trash collection still comes from your property taxes, but if you need to dispose of some extra waste the city isn’t on the hook for it, and if your neighbor is throwing away lots of extra waste YOU aren’t on the hook for it. And the local markets don’t seem to mind, because the number of bags they have to carry is small enough to represent a trivial expense…

In the Concord example, the obvious solution would be to allow the markets to raise the price of PAYT bags by just a few cents each (say, to $1.09 and $2.09, respectively) to cover stocking and handling expenses, or else cut them in on a similar amount of the money the town is making on the bags. You’re still going to have a problem with people buying generic trash bags and throwing them into dumpsters (or leaving them by the side of the road), but at least you won’t be placing what is effectively an unauthorized, unilateral tax burden on businesses that only make a 1% to 1.25% profit margin in the first place. And I’m really not sure what the town is going to do if some of the people commenting on the linked news story make good on that threat to start making counterfeit PAYT bags and selling them for half of the usual price…

Maybe the East Lansing model is a better idea than I thought…