Our county is attempting to find a way to compensate/incentivise local trash haulers for reducing the amount of waste that is taken to the local landfill. In the past the haulers were paid to take trash to the landfill in an adjacent county. So, the more garbage that they took, the more they made. Now, we are trying to compost locally and want to find a way to encourage haulers to reduce the amount of waste that they take, but this means that they would make less money. Does anyone know of an example of how a community has successfully made this sort of transition?
Thanks,
Penny McBride
Terra Firma Organics
Jackson Hole, Wyoming
Compensation for Transformation
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Hi Penny,
One approach is to set a realistic flat contract fee for trash handling for a specific service area (perhaps on a per-customer basis by customer category), so that the hauler's best means of increasing profit is to minimize wastes and waste hauling costs. Composting and other waste diversion efforts become the waste hauler's best friend. Requires careful handling of the terms of required service, and allowance for limitations on the amount of waste that must be collected from each customer per run or per unit time. You can probably find plenty of useful information in a web search of "integrated waste management" and "pay as you throw."
Bill Carter
Water Quality Monitoring & Assessment MC
165 Texas Commission on Environmental Quality
P.O. Box 13087 Austin, TX 78711-3087
Phone: 512-239-6771
Fax: 512-239-4410
[email protected]