With Saskatoon City Council’s decision Monday to move to a pay-as-you-throw waste collection model, we turned to a community that has gone through that experience.
CTV Saskatoon anchor Sean Leslie spoke with Brandon Bennet, director of code compliance in Fort Worth, Texas about their move to pay-as-you-throw in 2003.
What was the problem?
We were like many cities where residents could essentially put as much garbage as they wanted to the curb. Our landfill had a 50-year life to it and we looked out into the future and said look, the landfill’s not going to last forever. We looked at cities like Edmonton that were struggling to come up with landfill alternatives. And we decided to go with pay-as-you-throw as a system because those who produce the least amount of garbage pay the lowest rate and those that produce the most pay the highest rate.
What we found as a benefit to that was actually a higher recycle rate for your typical recyclables as well as yard waste and now moving into organics just like you are up there.
In North America, it doesn’t matter which side of the border you’re on, about 40 to 50 per cent of everybody’s waste is still material that could be easily recycled. So if you go to a pay-as-you-throw system, what you find over time is people come to realize that they can save money for themselves and do something good for the community in the long term by recycling more. Recycling actually adds money to the system – putting it in a landfill actually takes money out of the system.
How did citizens react?
Well this is Texas, and in Texas we’re all about, you know, pickup trucks and filling up the landfill and everything else that’s excessive, so yeah we had a lot of challenges. And then of course over time, even the people that were the staunchest of objectors have come around to understand that this is really the better way to handle a solid waste system.
How high were the fees?
I don’t think there’s a solid waste system that you can compare from one city to another, they’re all a little bit different. I know up in your neck of the woods they’re looking at a utility for the waste, but still covering some of it, like the organics, through general taxes.
But truly, at the end of the day what you find is that it tends to be a little bit more expensive with a cart system as opposed to throwing bags at the curb and tends to be a little bit more expensive for your high generators on a pay-as-you throw system. But over time those people that are using the smaller carts generally will enjoy a much lower rate.
Was there more illegal dumping as a result?
I will tell you to begin with that there were certain neighbourhoods that essentially looked like a war zone. That is one of the concerns that you have to build into any change in the solid waste system, whether it’s a rate increase, pay-as-you-throw, adding carts.
And so it’s like graffiti in the sense that you do all the education that you can do and then when you have illegal dumping you have to get it cleaned up right away because a little bit of illegal dumping will be a lot of illegal dumping if you don’t get it cleaned up. Over time what happens is people get used to the new system and you don’t see as much.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
