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Until a few years ago, the city of Plympton, Massachusetts, literally threw money. People produced so much waste that it threatened to put the municipal transfer station on bankruptcy.
As part of the city’s system, residents would buy a $ 240 sticker for their cars which allowed them one year access to the discharge, where they could eliminate as much garbage as they wanted. But the pure volume, combined with climbing discharge costs, meant that this service cost almost double the local government.
One solution was to double the price of discharge stickers, but this would hit the low -income population of Plympton particularly harshly and would not have been just for small households – like the elderly – who produced a minimum of waste. Thus, the city of around 3,000 decided to try something that he had seen from other municipalities: loading by bag.
“He has practically reduced waste by half,” said Rob Firlotte, the Plympton road superintendent, about the results. In 2022, before the new system, the city threw 640 tonnes of waste. Last year, this figure was 335 tonnes. “It pushed people to recycle more, as it saves them money,” said Firlotte.
Stickers are now sold for $ 65 each and residents buy specially marked garbage bags at prices ($ 1.25 for a bag of 15 gallons, $ 2.50 for 33 gallons). This means that a cleaning producing a small bag of waste each week would spend $ 130 per year – $ 350 less than they would have decided to double its sticker prices instead. The city says that it has reduced its waste disposal bill about half, saving about $ 65,000 per year.
“We went from a deficit to the very breakup,” said Firlotte.
Plympton is not the only one in its success. According to the Massachusetts environmental protection department, Almost half of the 351 state municipalities adopted a version of this “Pay-As-You-Throw” or Payt model. In 2023, the places with Payt collected approximately a third less waste, or around 513 pounds per household. A 2018 study in New Hampshire detailed in the same austere differences.
“We found that the demand for waste elimination was really sensitive to the price,” said John Halstead, author of this research and a retirement professor of environmental economics at the University of New Hampshire. “If you are increasing the price of waste, people will find ways not to put as much on the side of the sidewalk.”
Many other countries have used the collection of payment waste by volume for decades. There are limited examples in the United States dating from the beginning of the 20th century, said Lisa Skumatz, president of Skumatz Economic Research Associates, an energy, recycling and sustainable development firm. But contemporary implementation in America really started to increase in the 1980s in the early 2000s, and has experienced regular growth since then.
Although there are no recent national data on Payt, Skumatz believes that around a quarter of people in the United States have access to a sort of volume-based program. This not only includes brand brand models like Plympton, but also programs with prices based on the size of the trash (Like in Denver And Seattle), or in which people label each bag of garbage (as is the case With at least one carrier in Burlington, Vermont). All Oregon communities have access to an iteration of Payt, and the Natural Resources Defense Council has An invoice model that others can use if they plan to try it.
One of the keys to success is to ensure that the alternatives The discharge –as recycling And compost-are as robust as possible. “You should really be able to facilitate the reduction of their garbage,” said Linda Breggin, main lawyer of the Institute of Non -Lucrative Environmental Law. In addition to saving money, it has also noted that the production of fewer waste can mean less greenhouse gas emissions for discharges or incinerators and can stimulate the supply of recycled materials, which then prevents virgin materials to be used.
“You get a lot of co-supporters,” she said.
However, change often responds to resistance. Transporters, for example, often prefer the simplicity of loose waste when they make hundreds of stops on the street (they also frequently have the discharges that invoice the ton). For residents, waste costs that could have been cooked in their taxes could suddenly become visible.
“People have been used to you for decades,” said Skumatz. “”[But] Unlimited buffets lead to a lot of waste and a lot of bad behavior. »»
There are three main ways to produce less waste – reducing waste first and divert it to recycling or compost instead of a discharge. Payment by the bag encourages all these alternatives and also helps to reach the basic cohort of pure and hard environmentalists, which reduce, reuse and recycle already.
“You have to get the next group and the next group,” said Skumatz. “Many of these people react to financial incentives.”
A main argument among paid skeptics as a launch is that it could lead to an illegal spill. But Skumatz said that about 1,000 cities she interviewed, only a quarter saw an increase in this and, even then, it only lasted three months. Although it is more difficult to say if Payt leads people to collect the recycling flow with garbage, it is not a problem of which it has heard a lot of complaints.
“After six months, people tend to really prefer Payt to the previous system,” she said. “But it is really difficult for many communities to go through it.”
Firmotte said Plympton had seen grunts at first, but not a ton since the alternative doubled the price of the stickers. The elderly were particularly enthusiastic about the new approach, given the little waste they tend to produce. From the start, officials were also diligent as to the discouragement of illegal spill or dirty the recycling flow, so Firlotte said that cheating was a virtual non-emission.
“For us,” he said, “it worked very well.”
This article originally appeared in Grist has https://grist.org/accountability/what-one-etwn-learned-by-charging-residents-for-svery-bag-of-trash/. Grist is an independent non -profit media organization dedicated to telling stories of climatic solutions and a fair future. Learn more about Fat.
