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From The Dispatch:
Columbus unveils subscription plan for yard waste pickup
By Rober VitaleColumbus plans to restore yard-waste collection, but residents will have to pay for it directly. The Department of Public Service said this morning that it plans to introduce a subscription service through Rumpke of Ohio Inc., the private company that picked up yard waste until the city ended its contract during a round of January budget cuts. The reintroduced service will cost $49.50 for a six-month subscription. That breaks down to $1.90 a week.
“A better solution = composting or hauling away your yard waste to one of the free disposal sites.”
It may be a better solution to you, but to someone who does not have a method of hauling much of anything the fact that there are free disposal sites doesn’t do much good. I can schlep my recycling stuff to the local stop; I can’t haul 10 bags of leaves.
The city should end the curbside recycling program (anybody have a figure for how much that costs?) and reinstate yardwaste pick up. Think of it as a neighborhood building tool: while doing yard work is an easy way to meet the others on your street.
The city ended recycling pickup subsidies a little over a year ago.
Curbside recycling pickup is an optional subscription-based program that homeowners pay Rumpke directly for. Identical to this program for yard waste.
Thanks for the clarification. I knew rumpke raised the fees but didn’t realize the city no longer supported it at all.
and I have the curbside recycling…but like so many others, I see a huge number of recyclables in the dumpsters. i’m happy to pay for yard waste pick up, too, but that will not stop nearly every other house on my street using the dumpsters for yard waste.
composting isn’t an option for me and suggesting that that I haul it away myself seems naive.
I have to bring back former Republican mayorial candidate Bill Todd on this one. In his Alive interview, which was posted and debated on CU. Todd responded to the following question:
Many residents have questioned why trash pickup is free, but curbside recycling is not. Do you feel this should change?
Dumbest thing in the world. I mentioned before that SWACO was a good start. I’d like to see us regionalize our trash collection in some way, and if we did something like that, perhaps we could get it to the point where recycling is not a charged expense.
Talk about a disincentive to being environmentally friendly, when you charge somebody to recycle yet we don’t charge them for trash collection. So people throw stuff away instead of recycling. The incentives have to be switched around completely.
—
Alive: http://www.columbusalive.com/live/contentbe/EPIC_shim.php?story=alive/2007/1101/u-todd.html
CU: http://www.columbusunderground.com/the-race-for-city-hall-bill-todd
Yet here we are even further away, charging people fully for curbside recycling and for bulk yard waste, but no fee for sending all of their waste (including recyclables and compostable yard waste) to the county landfill.
berdawn Says: composting isn’t an option for me and suggesting that that I haul it away myself seems naive.
Sure. I’m not trying to suggest that it’s for everyone. Just trying to point out to anyone suggesting that we need options… well… we’ve got three. This city program is not the one and only solution right now.
Once again, if you could invest in a weed wacker you could compress your yard waste perhaps 100 fold and then simply store the remains in a large plastic bag in the basement or where ever and then in about a year you’d have compost. Very simple. I see these gigantic bags of leaves and a whole industry grown up around disposing of it and if everyone just took a little more time in the process we wouldn’t need big trucks and disposal sites.
However I do think it is somewhat ironic, that ‘nitrogenman’ should come over and pick up your carbon based materials. I guess I always wanted to be a superhero .
I’m sure it won’t be hard to find someone you know that would love and appreciate free fodder for the compost material.
I have to agree with Bill Todd and Dru. Charge for garbage not for recycling and yard waste pick up.
What is the political fallout for not charging for garbage? Everyone would have to pay. Poor people would be mad, seniors would be mad, and people who generate a lot of trash would be mad.
What’s the political price for charging for recycling and yard waste pickup and keeping garbage free? The environmentally responsible people who choose to pay the services are annoyed and chalk it up to hard times for City budgets, but everyone else gets to throw their recycling and yard waste in the garbage and is not paying and happy.
Seems like our politicians need to grow a pair and do the right thing rather than the politically expedient thing.
@ joev – it was one of the few things I agreed w/ Bill Todd about. but the point has stuck in my head long enough for me to remember to go find it months after the election.