I was giving a little more thought to the issue of the city’s decision to cut the white community recycling bins.
I did a little quick math, assuming that statistics thrown around by the city are correct.
The Department of Environmental Services website says 160,000 single family homes now have curbside recycling, with another 20,000 currently outside of the service area. The city decided that experimenting with how to service these additional homes is a higher priority than continuing the white bin program.
It seems to me the basic math calls that into question.
Curbside recycling at those 160,000 homes collects about 20,000 tons annually.
The additional 20,000 homes represent 1/8 of the number of homes that already have curbside pickup, so would be expected to increase the total amount of recycled material by the same proportion. This means extending curbside recycling to all single family homes would increase the total by 2,500 tons annually.
Compare that to the white bin program, which was bringing in 4,000 tons annually, or 60 percent more than the still theoretical expansion, according to the city’s statistics. An improved and more efficient community program would most likely expand that total.
Obviously this rough math isn’t a final answer, but it does suggest that supporters of the white bin program shouldn’t be so quickly dismissed.
Ian, your armchair arithmetic is, indeed, too “basic” and “rough” for at least two reasons.
First, as I understand it, the white bins no longer take in that 4,000 tons. Most is going into the automated pickup bins at the 160,000 homes serviced in that fashion.
Second, the was paying out of pocket to sustain the bins which are generating
insufficient income for the contractor to keep servicing them. Using those funds to transition to automated pickup in the remaining 20,000 households will permit the City to eventually recycle more than with the bins due to the greater convenience.
Or, at least this is the reasoning of longtime City recycling coordinator, Suzanne Jones, who has gotten us this far. Will you please get off your armchair and run your gripe past her or tell us why you can’t or won’t?
I just took the 4,000 ton figure from the November report filed with the city council. The figure used to be much higher.
The white bins were a great idea initially, but they’ve enjoyed an unwarranted subsidy for years, mostly benefiting a single politically connected trash hauler.
You ought to know better.
What if that hauler is now making sure the stuff piles up at the bins to “justify” an even larger unwarranted subsidy that a notoriously unscrupulous friend and yet inexplicable media darling on the City Council helpfully embedded in next year’s budget?
City taxpayers should not be forced to continue this giveaway just so a private trash hauler can rake in more money and you can feel good about yourself when you’re done with your latest wine bottle.
Your commentaries on this issue have been naive, reckless, unfair, and uninformed, and Civil Beat was foolish to publish one.
There is less newspaper produced nowadays, so those white recycling bins became repositories of cardboard, which is much lighter and less efficient to process. So the City has lost interest in supporting the program.
Interestingly, old cardboard is worth quite a bit, and is the object of desire for thieves.
http://www.marketplace.org/topics/life/lucrative-crime-cardboard-theft
What we need in Hawaii are more ‘thieves’ like this. All that cardboard is just sitting out there in those bins and no one is ‘stealing’ it to recycle it.
One thing we could do is to bring in motivational speakers like Tony Robbins in order to energize and inspire potential thieves to get off the couch, get in their trucks, go down to their local white recycling bin and fill their beds with cardboard and take it to a recycling center.
Another thing we could do is to put a refundable tax on cardboard boxes the way we do on soda cans and bottles — say, a 10 cent tax on all cardboard boxes, regardless of size (this would encourage economies of scale in terms of box usage). Then, those who return cardboard to recycling centers could be compensated at a higher rate.
Is this recycling strategy too profit-oriented to appeal to an idealistic liberal like Ian Lind? Conversely, is it distasteful somehow to conservatives as well because it involves the word “tax”?
Well, as President Obama would probably say (in private, of course), if it alienates all the ideologues, it’s probably the right policy.
I say, if this policy is good enough for cans and bottles, it’s probably good for cardboard, too.
Here’s a waste disposal policy that just might promote recycling. It’s called ‘Pay As You Throw’.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pay_as_you_throw
There are three main types of PAYT programs that remind me a bit of cell phone payment programs (prepaid vs. contract, overage charges, etc.).
The primary purpose of PAYT is to disincentivize people from generating waste in the first place.
The deeper rationales are the promotion of the economy, the environment and social justice.
Two initial problems with a PAYT system are 1) initial unpopularity, and 2) illegal dumping. In reality, neither of these concerns is a problem once PAYT is established.
The results of a PAYT program in Taiwan are impressive. “As a result Taipei’s waste volume is down 35.08%, and recycling has increased 2.6-fold from 1999.”
One question is whether a program like this could be phased in gradually, while the traditional payment method (property taxes) would get phased out over time.
Another question is whether this would be a feasible model for other public services (e.g., road maintenance, sewers, etc.).
Here’s something related to my question of whether it is possible to have “pay as you go” roads.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_roads
One of the arguments of road privatization is that private roads would not suffer from the “free rider problem”, meaning those who don’t pay for the service could not use it.
This is a peculiar argument to me, and the extreme way it is phrased (comparing the road system to the Soviet economy) seems symptomatic of this peculiarity.
Every region has businesses, and those businesses desire traffic. Shopping malls, for instance, want customers from all over. The privatization of all roads might be expected to curtail traffic congestion and solve the free rider problem on the roads, but don’t most citizens want some free riders on our roads (especially tourists)?
Another argument given is that “Competition will motivate better service than is provided by regional monopolies”. No mention is made of what those services are, however.
“Privatization will encourage infrastructure construction”. Again, no mention is made of examples of this working. It is mentioned that “The book Street Smart claims that Brazil has saved 20 percent and Columbia 50 percent through efforts to outsource road maintenance to the private sector.” That sounds plausible, but does not represent the encouragement of construction.
“Free market roads facilitate internalization of external costs”.
This falls under the rubric of social justice, in the sense that the PAYT program compels those who use the service to be the ones to pay for it. However, no mention is made of examples of this.
An interesting argument is that “Private roads couldn’t use eminent domain”.
This argument appeals to both those who would want to limit development and those who want to limit government power. Moreover, there has also been an outcry against eminent domain by both liberals concerned with corporate control and conservatives who fear government abuse after the Supreme Court’s controversial Kelo decision. From the wiki on eminent domain:
The argument for privatization of transit options might therefore be appealing across the political spectrum in an age when so much policy conforms to neither the traditional left or right. (The Supreme Court today is said to be ‘conservative’, but the Kelo decision reveals that the current Supreme Court is really idiosyncratic — which is not what is to be expected from the legal profession, which is founded on tradition and precedent.)
“Free market roads will have less crime”. This is the argument for privatizing Fort Street Mall downtown, and it does have some plausibility. However, the argument is made is much too idealized.
That sounds like a libertarian fantasy. First, it would be extremely hard to identify professional criminals (who specialize in deception), and, second, people who do not conform to outward social norms such as dress are almost immediately harassed and expelled when they are on private property.
Finally, “Free market roads will encourage small business”. This is an interesting argument, and perhaps plausible.
So, without big transportation projects, there would be less in the way of big corporations dominating the economy (and thus dominating the society and the political system). But I wonder if this would be what politicians, bureaucrats and Big Labor would want. Moreover, these groups ultimately control society via coalitions (“iron triangles”).
In sum, ultimately, I am not convinced of this idea of privatizing all roads.
However, I think the argument could be made that neighborhoods, and not the state or the county, should pay to build and maintain the neighborhood’s roads.
Rural suburbs in particular are living way beyond their means. When the price of oil drops, fringe suburbs pop up far from town; when the price of oil rises, they get abandoned as people move into town. Subsidizing suburban sprawl is simply using up resources and feeding further inevitable foreclosures. Cultural conservatives who want that kind of suburban lifestyle choice need to pay for more of it (they need to be more fiscally conservative in their own lives).