I wish my mom actually followed though on sending my brussels sprouts to the starving kids via mail when I was a kid because it would have been hilarious.
I pay $85 a quarter for a huge trash can and a huge recycling can (the kinds with wheels that’d hold at least a couple bodies). They pickup once a week.
I live in a major city and pay $75 quarterly for trash and recycling bins that are picked up weekly semi-reliably. They get a lot of holidays for being an American company and anytime there’s even the hint of inclement weather they cancel pickup and I have a full bin of trash for another week lol and of course I can’t leave the bin out where it don’t smell up my garage because the HOA doesn’t allow the bins to be outside during daytime except pickup day and it must be placed back inside by the day after pickup because these people have nothing going on with their lives
We get billed about $275 for 2 months. Did a couple months of that when we first moved in and things were crazy, but now that we settled, I just take it to the disposal myself and spend about $100 for 2 months. Quite the savings.
My guess is that they’re rural. Lots of rural communities have such high trash fees that they’ll opt to just burn it instead. Because no trash company wants to drive 45 minutes outside of town just for one pickup, and the local municipality doesn’t cover them because they’re outside of the city limits.
But it sounds way more involved than putting a bin to the curb. Also, if you're compressing it anyways you can probably fit a months worth of garbage into one bin.
In the USA, you usually pay for garbage collection services which are private companies that provide you trash and recycling bins and they pick them up from your house on a regular schedule, usually once or twice a week. If you live in a rural area, really rural, you might need to handle your own garbage. In these cases you either haul it in your truck to a dump where you either pay a flat rate to dump, or pay by the pound (they weigh your car before and after), or some places allow you burn trash if you’re really in the middle of nowhere.
Sometimes payment for these services is included in rent, HOA fees, or sometimes you hire/pay seperately.
Ohh ok ok. Yeah, very different from Greece. Probably because Greece isn't that much of a capitalistic country I think🤷. We just have some big trash cans (around 1m³ of volume) every like 50meters (±40meters) in residential areas and trucks pick up the garbage.
They are by the streets/in indetations of the pavement (I've seen in other european countries, that they have those trash cans inside an apartment complex instead and other stuff. We had hard time figuring out where to throw our trash in Hungary).
Though people doesnt care very much of what they dispose of and frequnetly you can see stuff like big carboards and abandoned furniture near those trash cans which are rarely collected (many times you have to call the appropriate service of the municipalty).
We also have those small bins (around 50liters) on the pavement scattered around in the cities where you can throw various small garbage.
On a holiday to a suburban part of the States we walked around and counted over 10 different individual services on a single street. Blew my mind. I get what others are saying that obviously whether you're paying privately or through taxes etc it still costs money, but what really sticks with me is what I can only assume is huge inefficiencies in these areas
I'm not much a defender of capitalism, the abuses have become rampant over the past few decades. But the general idea is sound.
But talk like this is also a problem. No, hell no, your garbage collection is not free. What makes you think that? Just because you don't get a bill?
I have two options in my hood. Competition keeps 'em honest, keeps prices low. If I charged my neighbor her half, it's $17.50/mo. It's so cheap I just let her use my cans for free. (EDIT: Noticed they raised it since my last comment. $50 for two cans, twice a week pick up. $25 bucks each household.)
So be honest, how much do you really pay? The amount is surely itemized somewhere in your local taxes. In any case you can look it up. I showed you mine, show me yours.
I made another post here. Be curious how your experience differs from mine. Maybe counterintuitive, but I've found private trash collection to be more environmentally friendly, for the reasons I gave above.
Of course...? Trash collection has to be paid for, either privately or publicly, e.g. taxes. There's an Australian commenter below who pays almost double what I do as a yearly tax. In any case, you can always opt to deal with your own waste.
For example, I could burn, recycle and compost most of it for free. I make mulch from yard waste, ditch metal by posting on FB Marketplace, Craigslist, etc., for the scrap metal guys to grab.
Same for serviceable goods. Just put out some lawn chairs that I don't have the tooling to repair, and they're gone. I used to pick up old vacuum cleaners and repair them for a few dollars, give them to friends and neighbors or sell 'em for $20. (Great little side hustle. 95% of them just need a deep clean, new belt and bag.)
I've picked up a literal ton of stuff that's not good enough for one's home but works great at my camp in the boondocks. Got my wife a new TV yesterday and converted the Styrofoam packing into napalm for starting campfires.
I have two companies to choose from, because competition is good. $35/mo. covers my trash, and since my neighbor doesn't have much money, I let her use my cans. Call it <$20 per household. Think the government could operate that cheaply?
Buddy of mine drives around picking up old washers and dryers for free. Fixes and flips 'em for a nice profit. (This is hilariously easy.) He clears $100+ a pop, and people save $200-$400 on a new machine. Win-win.
In my area, if the government handled it all for "free", all that creative recycling/upcycling would end up in a landfill. Because who would give a shit? When you have to pay out your pocket for disposal it motivates you to think. Why would I bother rinsing and crushing my cans for personal profit if the govenment made them go away for free?
That's not how it works in practice though because most people aren't shits and just put their rubbish in the right bins. It's great that you're motivated to go above and beyond, but I imagine there's a lot more fly-tipping for people who don't want to spend any money or effort.
It can also be included as part of your taxes as well. I used to live literally 1 street over from where the official city limits were (a whole 1 mile from downtown), and while the city provided trash/recycling services within that boundary, anyone outside had to pay like $30/mo for a private service that only did trash pickup, and had to pay another $12/mo for recycling.
In my new town, we're on the very outskirts of the city, but it's all provided by the city as part of our property taxes. We get recycling, trash, and compost services. Best part is you even get 1m³ compost and mulch from the city from the compost service. We grew an absolutely insane amount of vegetables from it last year, it was really awesome.
This is never something I'd have even thought about being privatised, I guess I just assumed it was always in the interest of local authorities to make sure there isn't just shit piling up everywhere and pay for it through taxation. It's also surely much more cost effective to centralise.
Today I not only discover that isn't the case, but that you also commonly have to pay extra to recycle. Like what?! Do poorer people have to just not have their bins collected? Or make a choice about whether things get recycled?!
This has absolutely blown my mind!
If you take it to a refuse & recycling centre yourself (I assume those exist with public access), do you have to pay for that too?!
Do poorer people have to just not have their bins collected? Or make a choice about whether things get recycled?!
Yup. As always, it's very expensive to be poor, and you wind up having to haul stuff to the dump yourself, taking the time, fuel, etc to do it.
I didn't pay for recycling with Waste Management, because I knew that 95% of it would go to landfill anyway, so why bother? It's literally just a way for people to greenwash their disposable lifestyle and WM profits off it.
If you take it to a refuse & recycling centre yourself (I assume those exist with public access), do you have to pay for that too?!
Yes. Even in my town, there's still an additional fee for taking certain things to the disposal/recycling center. It's only a couple of dollars, but it's also mostly for stuff that's hazmat.
Fortunately, my state of Michigan has a seperate program for bottles and cans, and I make damn sure those never go to landfill. Something like 97% of those are recycled here. The only other "recyclable" waste we really had would have been plastics, so like you said there was really no reason. I had a seperate bin for non-returnable glass/steel/aluminum that I'd bring over to a community recycling center every once in a while, so it's not like I was throwing everything out. I still tried my best, but it just really made no sense to pay that much per month for a bin that we'd manage to fill maybe twice a year.
I put in far, far more effort than most to minimize my waste, but there's always a point where it's just not worth it unfortunately.
Iowa and Illinois also do that. I live in rural Wisconsin but I know people who will collect their bottles and cans until they have gigantic bins full and drive them to a neighboring state to redeem them (usually as part of trip to a larger city for shopping)
It's hard to choose to recycle here. Not only is it expensive, but it feels like they change what they can recycle every 2 weeks (exaggerating but still).
Also, sorting and rinsing everything takes a lot of time when you have to work 3 jobs just to afford your apartment. For me personally, though, I don't work (can't) but I have so many doctors appointments that I might as well. And my disabilities make it hard to take the extra time to sort.
Sometimes - well, not in my town, but I've seen it happen - the same truck picks up both the trash and the recycle. So there's not really a point to sorting it in those places since it all goes in the same truck. In places where they do put them on different trucks, "recycling" centers have been caught selling the items to other states or even other countries, and most of the time is rerouted to landfills.
A lot of people in my town put their recyclables in plastic bags, which obviously can't be recycled, so then it ends up at the landfill anyway.
This varies heavily by location. I'm not sure "usually" comes into it. In and around cities it's not uncommon for the city government to handle trash collection. Farther out into the 'burbs or in rural locations you might have to hire a private trash company.
Well obviously someone is paying for garbage collection, I just think a lot of people are used to having it be paid for over tax, so that you don't have to think about remembering to pay your quarterly $85 fee lol.
Allow is a stretch, back in the rural part of the US I grew up in we burned our trash since there was no trash company that serviced within 50 miles of us. No one cares for the environmental or health impacts of it when there no other realistic option
Sometimes payment for these services is included in rent, HOA fees, or sometimes you hire/pay seperately.
Or included in property tax, because (as a matter of public health) they really don't want anybody to be able to avoid paying it.
In my city, it's a flat fee per residence (as opposed to scaling with the millage rate), so it's broken out on a separate line-item. It's a little over $500/year.
The funniest bit is their garbage men are painfully bad, watching them is like comedy - lifting bags out the bins with their hands, spilling it all down the road, all flying out the truck as they drive down the road.
That's weird. Not sure where you are. Where I live the city just adds it to the utility bill (trash, sewer, and water). That sounds like it's probably expensive. Fuck that.
