Until a few years ago, the city of Plympton, Massachusetts, was literally throwing money away. People produced so much garbage that it threatened to remove the urban transfer station.
Under the town’s system, residents would buy a $ 240 sticker for their cars, which allowed them annual access to the trash, where they could provide as much garbage as they wished. But the huge volume, combined with climbing verterative fees, meant that this service cost the local government almost twice as much as what it took.
One solution was to double the price of clearing stickers, but that would hit the low income population of Plympton particularly difficult and would not be fair to smaller homes-as old people-who produced minimum garbage. So, the city about 3,000 decided to try something it saw other municipalities do: load with a bag.
“It almost cut waste half,” Rob Firlotte, Plympton’s highway, said of the results. In 2022, before the new system, the city dumped 640 tons of garbage. Last year, that figure was 335 tons. “It pushed people to recycling more, as it saves them money,” Firlotte said.
Stickers are now selling for $ 65 each, and residents buy specially marked rubbish bags with a size price ($ 1.25 for a 15-gallon bag, $ 2.50 for 33 gallons). This means that a household producing one small bag of trash weekly would spend $ 130 a year – $ 350 less than they had if Plympton decided to double their stickers instead. The town says it cut its rubbish waste about half, saving about $ 65,000 a year.
“We went from deficit to breaking,” said Firlotte.
Plympton is not alone in his success. According to the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Nearly half of the state’s 351 municipalities Adopted a version of this “PAG-as-you-Throw”, or Payt, model. In 2023, places with Payt collected about one third less waste, or about 513 pounds per household. A 2018 study in New -hampshire detailed similarly strict Differences.
“We found that demand for waste really responds to a price,” said John Halstead, author of that research and retired professor of environmental economy at the University of New Hampshire. “If you raise the price of garbage, people will find ways not to put as much at the curtain.”
Many other countries have used a salary collection of volume waste for decades. There are limited examples in the United States dating from the early 20th century, said Lisa Skumatz, president of Skumatz Economic Research Associates, Energy, Recycling and Sustainable Counsel. But contemporary implementation in America has really begun to increase in the 1980s through the early 2000, and has seen constant growth since then.
While there is no recent national data on Payt, Skumatz estimates that about a quarter of people in the United States have access to some volume-based program. This includes not only brand bag models like Plympton’s, but programs with prices based on the size of the buckets (As in Denver And Seattle), or in which people label every bag of garbage (as it happens With at least one carrier in Burlington, Vermont). All Oregon communities have access to any Iteration of Payt, and the Natural Resource Defense Council has Model bill That others can use if they consider to try it.
One of the keys to success is to ensure the alternatives to the vertero-As Recycling And Compost –are as strong as possible. “You can really facilitate the homes to reduce her garbage,” said Linda Breggin, a senior lawyer at the nonprofit environmental legal institute. In addition to saving money, she also realized that producing fewer garbage can mean fewer greenhouse emissions of greenhouse gases from vertebrae or incinegers and can accelerate the supply of recycled material, which then avoids virgin material.
“You get a lot of co-benefits,” she said.
However, change often meets resistance. Transporters, for example, often prefer the simplicity of wholesale garbage when making hundreds of curved stops (they also often own the vertars that load the ton). For residents, a bucket that may have been baked into their taxes could suddenly become visible.
“People have been accustomed to all-you-can eat garbage for decades,” Skumatz said. “[But] All-you-can eat toads leads to a lot of waste and to many bad behaviors. ”
There are three main ways to produce less garbage – reduce waste in the first place, and divert it to recycling or compost instead of a vertechaera. Paying with the bag encourages all these alternatives and also helps achieve beyond the core cohort of Diehards, or environmentalists who already reduce, reuse and recycle.
“You need to get the next group and the next group,” Skumatz said. “Many people respond to financial incentives.”
A primary argument between wage skeptics is that it could lead to illegal emptying. But Skumatz said that of the about 1,000 cities she investigated, only a quarter saw any ascent in it and, even then, it only lasted about three months. Although it is harder to tell if Payt leads people to stick the recycle stream with garbage, there is no problem she has heard many complaints.
“After six months, people tend to really prefer Payt over the previous system,” she said. “But it’s really hard for many communities to go through that.”
Firlotte said Plympton saw some growling at first, but not a ton considering that the alternative doubled the price of the sticker. Older people were particularly excited about the new approach, considering how little garbage they tend to produce. From the outset, officials were also dedicated to discouraging illegal emptying or dirt of the recycling, so Firlotte said that cheating was a virtual no -release.
“For us,” he said, “it turned out great.”
This article originally appeared in Gist at https://grist.org/accountability/what-one-town-learned—bar–carging-residents-for-evry-bag -of-trash/. Grist is a non -profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories about climate solutions and a fair future. Learn more at Grain.org.
