Trash Talk


This post was inspired by what I saw right outside my bedroom window one morning when I was in San Jose. It was the garbage truck, pulling up in front of my parents' house to take away the trash. Instead of three men - one driver, two scurrying to the curb to hoist bags and cans and throw the contents into their truck - there was but one, a driver with joystick control of a big arm that swooped down, clamped onto city-regulation containers (one for trash, one for recyclables), and dumped them down into the truck. Out of the three or four houses within eyeshot of my window, I only saw the driver have to get out of the truck once, when his metal arm knocked one bin sideways and he had to reposition it so it could be grabbed again.

This seems a good way to save money, albeit with high upfront capital investment for special trucks, especially since I would imagine worker compensation claims plummet when you don't ask your guys to lift heavy objects. Also, there is incentive to downsize your trash: you only get one trash bin a week, and you pay more if you ask for the larger size bin rather than the regulation size. Plus, there's something nice and tidy about garbage day when as far as you can see are two bins in front of each house, each the same size and color and each facing the same way. (Don't get my wife started on the motley assortment of containers used for garbage by people on our block.) Hey Philly, send one of your Sanitation guys to San Jose to figure out how to make this happen here. Better yet, I'll read this post for free and get cracking on it stat.

Comments

Nicholas said…
I wonder what the cost of maintaining those robotic arms is compared to the cost of trashmen.

It does seem like the reforms required to have standardized containers in standardized positions accessible around parked cars are very far off in Philadelphia.
LH said…
Nicholas - Good point re: relative difference in access on tight city streets where cars are parked vs. wider suburban streets where cars are tucked away in garages. So execution will have to look different in Philadelphia than in San Jose. Still, the combination of 1) replacing labor costs with capital costs and 2) training homeowners to prepare their trash a certain way seems to be a necessity in today's budget-constrained times.
Nicholas said…
Maybe we could have vacuum tubes that reach over cars and suck the garbage out. That would be pretty cool to see.

Do you think a change in this manner could be framed more acceptably than last year's attempt to charge (more?) for pickup? If I remember the argument then was that imposing more restrictions on legitimate disposal would cause more illegal dumping, already a big problem here.
LH said…
Nicholas -

The crankiness there was that we were all suffering from the recession, and the media was picking up every instance of government waste, so the notion that the City would charge us for trash pickup when 1) we don't have any money, 2) you apparently have enough to be able to waste, and 3) we already pay for it in the form of property taxes (which you are planning on hiking up as well) . . . well, that just riled everyone up. Whether or not "pay as you throw" was going to lead to efficiency in trash generation or rampant shirking (illegal dumping, build-up in one's backyard) was a side conversation, mostly picked up by us more wonky types.

But you are correct in wondering how to frame the change. Assuming this is a long-term savings (and I realize that's a big assumption), you borrow the money to pay for the upfront capital costs, use some of the savings to pay off the debt, and use some of the savings to reduce taxes. Lower taxes is the trade-off for us having to actually be organized about putting out our trash, and enforcement of doing that right would probably go over well with concerned residents and fed-up block captains.

At least that's how I hope stuff like this plays out.

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