Work with solid-waste disposal and you will get a jaundiced view of human nature. That must be true for St. Paul officials faced with 18,000 incidents of illegal waste dumping each year. This highlights a paradox: Policies to foster cost-efficient hauling or to reduce waste volumes also motivate people to dump trash on someone else’s property.
Every household and business produces solid waste. None wants to spend much money getting rid of it.
Constructing sanitary landfills is expensive, and no one wants a new one close by. Incinerators reduce volumes and can produce energy, but can produce other pollution.
Property owners and local government both benefit from minimizing the cost of waste disposal. Different communities take different approaches.
Some make waste hauling a municipal service performed by public employees using government equipment. Others contract a private firm and pay it with municipal funds. Still others grant private haulers exclusive concessions and let them bill property owners from an approved rate schedule. Some, like St. Paul, let each property owner hire whatever private hauling service they choose.
There is a public interest in reducing the amount of waste that goes to landfills or is incinerated, but it isn’t easy to do.
When cities incorporate the cost in local taxes or contract with haulers for lump sums, there is no financial incentive to individual property owners to reduce the waste they generate.
Some cities have moved to a hybrid system in which households must purchase official garbage bags or tags for trash cans or other items. The price of the bag or tag incorporates the cost of hauling. The city or contract hauler then picks up all official bags or tagged objects.
Systems where haulers holding a concession can charge individual property owners quantity-based rates can provide incentives for people to toss less. The same can be true in cities like St. Paul, where property owners arrange for their own service. Private haulers generally get the job done at less direct cost than public ones. However, there are some costs to systems with competing private services that often get ignored in cost comparisons, such as greater truck traffic and damage to streets and alleys.
Systems where customers pay more to throw out more do reduce waste volumes somewhat. Some such reductions are more apparent than real. When Seattle started to charge on a volume basis, residents quickly learned the “Seattle stomp” to get more trash into any given container. That reduced the physical volume somewhat, but tonnage much less.
All systems where individual property owners must pay create an incentive for people to avoid that expense by clandestinely dropping their trash somewhere else — in a vacant lot, or on any other property. The higher the marginal cost faced by households, the greater the incentive for such “promiscuous dumping.” There is no neat solution.
© 2007 Edward Lotterman
Chanarambie Consulting, Inc.