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I've been out driving the backroads doing some photography. It seems every once beautiful back road has dumped couches, refrigerators,, and mattresses littering the shoulders. All these items have one thing in common, they are charging high rates at the county dumps now to dispose of them. This is bad policy if you want to keep the roads clean. Better to charge a fee for every one sold to cover the cost of eventual disposal. Roadside dumping is getting ugly.
Over the years I have been regularly using the mecham dump. Usually for a couple of bags of work (mobile biz) or catering trash that didn't fit in my personal trash. I used to be in and out usually for $5. Then it changed hands and prices went up. Then the fires hit, and prices increased again. Now it up to a minimum of $20? $25? Not sure, cause I stopped going. I'll ask a neighbor or something instead of that nonsense. They losing my money doing it too.
This system we have of monopolized... I mean, government contracted... trash services has to end. If we ever expect them to do more than charge us more for the same dump and service. Without competition, they have no incentive to change.
Guerneville Dump minimum is $30. Appliances are $20 (and they make money off them), refrigerators are $40. No wonder there is so much trash on the side of the road. Folks, the County is in it for the money, your money. Farming the dump out to Republic just raised the cost.
Minimum fee at Guerneville is $30. It was $15 then $25 now $30. I take a few bags of household and it costs me $30. People are holding on to their trash longer and as mentioned illegal dumping is increasing. It is also not helping the rodent problems which seem to be increasing year to year. Ever since it went private things have gone south. The lines are longer also. You have to go on the scale twice even if it's an obvious minimum fee. A for profit monopoly just doesn't work for the customers.
you're seeing the cheap version - dump by the side of the roads. There's a cost to handling garbage so if you don't want to pay it directly then you want it subsidized. The Catholic church subsidizes education -- maybe some church will subsidize garbage. Till one volunteers, though, I vote (pun intended) to let government do it. But if you don't want the fees, don't whine about the taxes. Or pretend it'd just be free if good capitalists could be let loose on it. They make lots of their money by avoiding direct costs in favor of imposing indirect costs on the rest of us, which is a hell of a way to get rich.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by ChefJayTay:
Refrigerators are $45 now to dump. So some guy has to move from a rental that he can barely afford anyway with his family. Now he might have to get rid of a fridge, an old couch and a bed to get your rental deposit back. The dump fees are close to $130. If you have money no big deal but if you are like many living pay check to pay check it is very tempting to take that pickup load and roll it out the back on some lonely stretch of road.
Another problem is guys are starting to just cut up those old refrigerators and throwing them into the blue bins unleashing the freon into the environment where it goes up and destroys the ozone.
You are very confused... and assuming things.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by podfish:
I would likely be willing to pay more for my trash collection.
Pending the company I could select ....perhaps would not require me to deal with 3 bins cause they actually sort stuff?Instead of being forced to deal with whoever got the contract?
perhaps would not care how much trash I have? or what kind?
perhaps would be open and honest about where our plastics are being recycled? Instead of being passed around and ending up shipped to some underdeveloped Asian country?
perhaps would consolidate specialized processing services over a larger area to reduce costs?
perhaps would be willing to invest in modern recycling techniques to attract customers?
Instead of dealing with the original complaint that there's trash piling up in rural areas?
There's places where the government controls everything... they're called dictatorships. Luckily Podfish you live in a country that'll let you move to one of them if you want (just be sure to check that the country will let you leave when you don't like it).
those options would all be great. You follow it with the weirdest non-sequitur though. There are animals that breathe water - they're called fish. Ok, I guess that's the weirdest non-sequitur.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by ChefJayTay:
I know there's some kind of fantasy that if only government would get out of the way all these neat eco-eco (economic ecology) niches would be filled. But to turn your example over, show me a place where you have such a widely variegated set of disposal options. Maybe in some nice capitalistic paradise, like Alabama? Can you really imagine opening a phone book ('cuz in the past, it was more free-market, right?) and saying "hmm.. I'm tired of burying my own garbage, and I can't just keep letting it pile up. Too many rats. Oh, this company's pretty cheap. I guess I'll do some research to see if they just dump it into the ocean. Hey, this one advertises that they sort, wash and find a good home for it, only $50 more a month! I'll go with them! Sure is lucky there's no regulation or government involvement, I wouldn't have that choice!!"
So that's a straw man. But garbage handling is a great test case for free-market vs. government because so many of the costs are easily sloughed off on the public if there's not regulation and enforcement, because it's a nearly universal need, and it's a need that's perceived as low-value by the public. Few care about anything but making the stuff disappear. I think the idea that government has created a monopoly situation that is unnecessary is pretty silly. It'd be neat if there were a bunch of budding entrepreneurs out there, dying to start creative business based on innovation in pickup-and disposal tech; maybe they're just waiting for Elon to make self-driving garbage trucks. And more seriously it would be nice if the county made some room for such things. Would you approve a budget increase to the bureau that does such planning, though? or complain that they aren't funding road repair?
Ok Goat Rock. This is what you gotta do with that junk refer. Take it apart. Pull all the panels off, the racks, unscrew stuff. Unscrew the motor. Take it apart, separate the copper, the plastics, the wheels, all the other metals, the wires. Scrape off the foam from the panels. Then get a siphon, and a sealed container, to extract the freon. Have a pump nearby, so you can pump the freon out of the tubes. Then you can recycle all the separate metal parts, and plastics. You can probably find someplace where you can get rid of the freon. This way you'll save the $45 dump fee!
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Posted in reply to the post by Goat Rock Ukulele:
My point is old refrigerators are getting dumped on the roadside and chopped up in back yards because of the high dumping fees. This is not in the public good. It is not as much a problem here in West County, but much more so around Windsor. There were two dumped by my driveway in Graton a couple weeks ago. An old refrigerator contains freon that is equivalent by weight to over 10,000 times the greenhouse pollution of that same weight of carbon dioxide. The newer ones that comply with the Montreal protocol over 5,000 times.
In Southern California they offer a bounty of around $40 for old refers. It is in all our interest that old refrigerators end up at a refrigerator a recycling plant (there are 36 around the country) not on the side of a road or pushed into a creek which is happening now. I'm willing to bet you can't find and old fridge along the roadside in So Cal.
now that's a good solution. It's not that I don't like Adam Smith - exploiting people's worse instincts is a great way to be successful. I just want to do it in a way that better aligns with the common good. So adding disposal fees to the cost of an object, and providing for free disposal, seems to serve everyone's interests except for those of two groups: the marketers who want to hide the actual cost (again exploiting our foibles) and those who want to have those costs paid by innocent bystanders.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Goat Rock Ukulele:
This is, of course, a monopoly and not free market, and monopolistic utilities need to be regulated. The fees should represent the costs, plus a reasonable profit if the company runs it services well. The costs are the time to weigh a vehicle (in wages and overhead). At 5 minutes per vehicle, i doubt the cost is more than a 5 or 10 dollars. So there should be a 5 or 10 dollar minimum. And a fee for handling the garbage by weight, which they have.Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by podfish:
So if the costs become too high, of course people will not be able to pay it. Thus this is a case where free market doesn't work and regulation needs to be in place. I concur disposal costs should be paid up front in the cost of the appliance (it already happens with electronics). without such a system, our county will be overrun with illegally dumped garbage.
I recommend we all write to our supervisors. This group seems to be better than most at tackling a problem.
I'm not surprised to see that people have decided to tell the new owners how much to charge to get rid of their garbage. It's $30 minimum at Meecham which seems a little high when you only have a couple bags.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned ZERO WASTE!
I'm not surprised that no one has come up with an alternative solution to what to do with all the garbage....
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned that Meecham does not accept GREEN WASTE anymore and that they decimated Recycle town.
- :2cents:
The problem is elucidated clearly by this years floods. All the garbage came out and most of it wasn't wet. The county struggled for weeks to shut down curb side dumping, and scavenging, at a cost of millions. I think the least expensive way to facilitate our insane garbage flow is to keep dump fees low, but then what do I know? It doesn't really matter who pays for it, if you want the roads clean. This is a first world problem in a declining empire. Garbology, the study of garbage and society, has noted that garbage production is highly indicative of a civilizations evolution. When garbage production goes down, the end is clear. Since ours is still going up, we haven't peaked yet.