'Pay As You Throw' Trash Programs Becoming More Popular In Mass.
BOSTON (CBS) - How does this sound? More recycling, less trash. It's called "Pay As You Throw" and with tight municipal budgets and landfills filling up, 40% of Massachusetts communities are doing it, and yours could be next. As we found out, it works, but there's a cost.
As you drive down the streets of Natick on pickup day, you see a lot of recycling, and not much trash. Natick has been a pay as you throw town for about 10 years. "We have a system where people buy individual bags, rolls of 10 bags, at the grocery story," says Josh Ostroff, the chair of Natick's Board of Selectman.
The blue bags hold all the trash. The cost? A large 33-gallon bag is $1.75 and a kitchen sized 15-gallon bag goes for a buck. If the garbage is not in one of those bags, "it will not be picked up," says Ostroff.
Natick switched to pay as you throw when the town faced a budget crisis. "Local aid had been cut and we had no way to fund schools, police, fire without making cuts," says Ostroff.
Trash disposal costs were an expensive and growing part of the budget, so they stopped using the property tax to pay for it and started charging per bag. But here's the thing. There's no fee for recycling. You guessed it, trash tonnage went down by as much as 30% and recycling increased by a similar amount. "It saved us a million and a half dollars a year in our budget because of the reduction of trash," says Ostroff.
If pay as you throw reduces trash and increases recycling, what's not to like? "I'm personally a family of seven. I have five kids, so pay as you grow would put a serious hurting on us," says one Norwell man.
And that's the rub. Norwell is considering pay as you throw because the town's trash disposal costs are set to double in the new year. "It will increase our overall line item by about $120,000," says Peter Dillon from the Norwell Board of Health, the agency that supervises trash and recycling pickup for the town. "Something would have to be taken away this year in order to make that work," he says.
A community can save a lot of money if people recycle more because getting rid of recyclables is a lot cheaper than getting rid of trash. But pay as you throw can be a tough sell. "I'm against it. Taxes in town are already very high," says another Norwell resident.
Norwell recycles at just 24%. "If we can go from the 24% to say 50%, if everybody gets out there and does it, then there won't be any need to go to pay as you throw," says Dillon. But without the economic incentive to recycle, that's a long shot and something is going to have to give in the town.
One hundred forty three Massachusetts cities and towns use pay as you throw. Some charge for every bag of trash, others give the first barrel free and charge for anything more. Statistics show it does work to reduce trash and increase recycling, but it also forces a community to make tough decisions.
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