The Trash of St. Louis County
Two stories related to trash in St. Louis County keep making regular appearances in the paper and on the news. One is the story about the county plan to create eight (8) trash districts with each getting a contract with a private trash hauler. The other story is of opposition to a trash transfer site to be operated by Fred Weber Inc in South County. The trash transfer site, per the Post-Dispatch, would “handle 500 tons of trash a day.”
St. Louis County is geographically large with more than eight times the land area of the City of St. Louis, yet it has barely more than a third the current density. Still, parts of the county are quite urban while other parts are very rural (for now at least). Much of the county is just a mass of ugly auto-centric sprawl. The County is also divided into 91 municipalities in addition to areas that remain unincorporated. For those of you native to St. Louis, St. Louis County has about 85 or so more municipalities than is considered normal. However it is the unincorporated area that is getting divided into trash districts for the purposes of hiring contractors to collect trash and recycling.
Subdivisions within the unincorporated section of the county can opt-out of the plan — instead hiring their own trash service or potentially letting each resident within the subdivision deal with their trash individually. From the Post-Dispatch:
Opponents say the districts would take away householders ability to choose their own haulers. The districts would lead to a monopoly of large haulers and put small haulers out of business, opponents say. The result, opponents declare, would be higher costs.
The county argues they doubt that one hauler would get all eight contracts that are out to bid. Furthermore, they’d like to see a reduction of the number of trucks on all their roadways with every resident hiring their own service.
The other issue is that of a transfer site, where the local trash trucks bring the trash for it to be loaded onto larger trucks (or is it barges?) to be hauled away to some unlucky place.
On the East side there has been controversy over a landfill that seeks to expand closer to a state park. Despite measures to ensure that landfills don’t leak, they do end up polluting ground water that is used for recreation, fishing and as fresh water sources.
Here is the deal folks, we generate far too much trash!!! It has to get picked up and it has to go somewhere. Don’t like it? Don’t produce so much of it. Even those that recycle are still often buying items with too much packaging. Add a water filter system to your sink rather than buy all those plastic bottles of water. The amount of money we spend on hauling off our trash, the space it consumes, and the damage to the environment is all shameful.
Yes, I have trash too and it pains me every time I toss something out — I think how can I go about reducing this excessive packaging? One solution is to buy products that don’t have packaging — such as fresh fruits and veggies. Skip the individual plastic bags in the produce section and use your own canvas bag at checkout. Better yet, buy at a local farmers’ market. When you have two near equal choices pick the one with less waste packaging.
Imagine, for a moment, that we all had to dispose of our own trash. Trash collection is just a government service we expect to be paid out of our taxes or in some cases it is something that a resident just writes a check for each month. Still, the consequences of our actions are so far removed from our everyday lives we don’t give it much thought. We haul the bag out and someone takes it away. Poorer countries are now accepting trash from wealthier nations. Your old pizza box just might end up in Africa!
In all the opposition to landfills, transfer sites or how trash is collected I’ve not seen one suggestion on actually reducing the volume of trash/recycling.
I know the focus of this post is to remind us to reduce and reuse, but would St. Louis city’s refuse be able to bid on a contract?
It just seems this might be a logical step in unifying the region.
MOST of STL County still does not have curb-side recycling. It seems like the logical first step is making all haulers that contract with the county offer recycling at a reasonable rate. I also like the above idea of STL City Refuse taking/bidding on some of the close inner-ring area contracts. If the truck is already on Gravois Rd, let it continue down Gravois one mile into Affton………
Hey Steve,
I am a big fan of the ‘green’ posts. I think many of us are reducing our consumption or at least acknowledging for the first time the impacts of it. I know my waste is overwelmingly in the form of restaurant take out or delivery. Any advice on that? I want to take the same box back to the pizzaria each time, just don’t think societal etiquette would allow for it.
MP
I’ve emailed various alderman and city officials to say that I would be more than happy to pay for my trash and have free recycling. Many cities around the country require folks to buy tags or stickers in order to get a bag of trash picked up, while recycling is free. It may be less convenient, but I think we have too much convenience anyway, and all of these cities get serious results when it comes to getting people to reduce all waste and increase recycling.
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I dunno what to do about take out. I have mentioned to various places like Whole Foods that it would be nice to have more food served on washable dishes there. What gets me is that people think every piece of broccli needs its own plastic bag at the grocery store. This is a great reason to bring cloth bags, you don’t feel weird about your lettuce touching the bag if its your own bag.
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Side note, China is phasing out (making illegal) cheap plastic bags this year. They had been using something like 5 BILLION a DAY! I would love to see this country do the same thing.
“Side note, China is phasing out (making illegal) cheap plastic bags this year. They had been using something like 5 BILLION a DAY! I would love to see this country do the same thing.”
San Francisco just made plastic bags illegal in grocery stores with pharmacies to follow soon after. Oakland, CA followed soon after. I’ve heard that Portland, OR and Long Beach, CA are looking to do the same. A bill went into effect in the state of CA in July that requires all grocery stores to accept and recycle used plastic bags. Hopefully, more cities/states across the country will start following these examples.
Aldi’s doesn’t give free plastic bags, so we carefully guard the bags we get from other stores to reuse at Aldi’s. Typical plastic grocery bags last a long time if used carefully. There’s no reason to vilify using plastic wisely. Paper bags don’t last.
The simplest way to reduce package waste is to eat healthy (think simple).
Conserve, reuse, recycle In that order!
Plastic bags use more energy to recycle than paper:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/graphic/2007/10/03/GR2007100301385.html
Still, we should all be using reusable bags to make it a moot point.
The simple reason St. Louis, or any other city, won’t be bidding on the contract is that their chances of winning it would be slim and none. Private contractors make money by being efficient and not paying their employees any more than the “market rate” for their wages. The city doesn’t face that competition, so efficiency slips and wages rise. A better alternative would be for St. Louis to solicit bids from private contractors to collect OUR trash . . .
The bulk of our trash comes from packaging. The rational answer is to sell in bulk, buy only what is needed, and to recycle the containers used to transport whatever home. This gets trumped by “convenience” and rational and irrational fears of contamination, enforced by laws meant to “protect” us from ourselves and others (“no touching”). We have plastic bubble packs to reduce theft. We have a state law that says a bottle of booze needs to go into a bag before it leaves the store. And yes, take-out and delivery foods exacerbate the problem, to say nothing of the increase in the carbon footprint multiple small daily trips make (by motor vehicle) compared to one bigger, weekly trip. We are all masters of our universes. We can make choices. We have seen the enemy and he is us.
Bill Burgeon said that “Plastic bags use more energy to recycle than paper”. Agreed. But plastic bags take up a lot less space in the landfill, which is where most of the end up, at least around here . . .
nothing but trash talk’n on this blog today
Trash is a reflection of our society. Excessive packaging is the norm in the free market economy that has been created. In Europe, many countries do a much better job of recycling and integrating recycling with daily life. Here in America, barriers against recycling are erected to protect profits, never mind the hidden costs borne by society.
If an American Indian of 300 years ago had a pickle jar with a screw cap, that jar would have been used and passed down generation to generation, literally hundreds of years if the jar didn’t break.
Here in America it is used once and thrown in the dump, hence massive landfills. A complete new approach is needed from conception of products to careful selection of the fate of leftover items. But every action requires modification of short term profit motives and their imaginary monetary gains, thus not much is likely to happen in America until the current economic model proves to be a complete failure.
I live in Ferguson, and we have curbside recycling included. Most weeks, my trash can is less than half full, while my recycling is filled to the top.
As far as Dooley’s trash district proposal is concerned … I’m generally for competition and free markets, so I’m inclined to be against it. But what really irks me here is the misplaced priorities … St. Louis county has totally failed the unincorporated areas here in north county in so many ways … crime is epidemic, housing stock is deteriorated, and the properties which the county has taken back for taxes are the most blighted of all. Communities like Dellwood, Ferguson, and Florissant, who are the neighbors of unincorporated north county, have done a great job maintaining these things, while the folks in Clayton have totally failed. Yet instead of focusing his energy on a plan to deal with these problems, Dooley is concerned that there are too many trash trucks driving down the street.
Jim Zavist
The citys trash pick up bill is far below the average county resident.
Where is your proof that the citys trash pick up system is not efficent???
Are you just being sarcastic or do you realy advocate for driving down wages af working people?
Nick, I’m confused about your logic. Unicorporated St. Louis is fighting the trash rules because it is someone telling them what to do. The same people who want the freedom to do whatever they want with their property without much consideration for their neighbor nor do they want the tax burden that pays for services that a city will provide. So how is St. Louis County failing them? Why, as a citizen of both Shrewsbury and St Louis County, should I expect to provide for someone who desires to have same amount of services as well as live in an unicorporated area? They are failing themselves.
Comparing the city and the county is difficult because of the completely-different ways trash pickup is budgeted and paid for. For county residents, the per-household cost is directly evident – you pay a monthly bill. For the city, the best I can provide is extrapolated from published public information. The trash division of the streets department has a ±$13 million budget for this year and appears to have something like 325 employees. (The budget includes personnel and landfill costs. It does not appear to cover vehicles or fuel. There appears to be ±$1.5 million budgeted for “rolling stock” replacement citywide.) Since I can’t find any information on the numebr of households St. Louis serves, there’s no way to break it down into a per-household cost. It also appears that the going entry rate for a bus driver at Metro or a tow-truck operator for the city is ±$13.80 per hour. Since there don’t appear to be any openings in the trash division, I’ll assume that they start in the same range. The city also provides twice-weekly residential pickup and leaf pickup in the fall, so service levels are not directly comparable, either.
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Bottom line, as a city, we apparently are choosing to provide relatively low-skill jobs with union-level wages and benefits. This is a political decision, and to a certain extent, an ethical decision. My point is that the city has a primary duty to deliver services to its citizens efficiently. Providing or maintaining the “wages of working people” should be a secondary goal. The large majority of the city’s residents do not work for the city, we pay taxes to pay the wages of the small minority of residents who do work for the city. Higher wages require either higher taxes or fewer employees. We who work in the private sector, especially in the ever-increasing number of non-union jobs, work in an employment-at-will environment and have seen expenses outstrip our incomes. We want to see city workers paid fairly, but we don’t understand the logic of annual cost-of-living increases when we’re not seeing them on our side. If our trash can be picked up more efficiently by the private sector, I really don’t care if an orange truck or a green truck is coming down the alley. And if the orange truck driver is being paid $14/hour (with full benefits) and the green truck driver is being paid $12/hour (with fewer benefits), I really don’t care either. The market should define what your labor is worth. I’d be more “sympathetic” if trash collection hadn’t become so mechanized, but the reality is that the job is easier now than it was twenty years ago, so there’s little reason to expect wages to stay at the same levels. Yes it’s boring, but most of the heavy lifting is gone.
Jim Zavist
I must have forgotten that the people that provide the labor have a say in what the “market” dictates… or did you?
To arbitrarily assign “skilled” or “un-skilled” labor is an insult. A person with a CDL and the stomach to pick up fowl smelling trash all day has some skills, at least skills I don’t have.
We live in a society that demands a complex and fully functioning infrastructure to operate. To save pennies on that infrastructure chasing some mythical low cost “privatization” scheme ends up with bridges collapsing and New Orleans flooding.
The invisible hand doesn’t nudge… it slaps.
Jim Zavist – one more thing
“we don’t understand the logic of annual cost-of-living increases when we’re not seeing them on our side.”
The short answer is the miracle of compound interest.
My landlord ups the rent on my apartment every year because the investors want a better return.
The price of bread milk and pampers goes up every year because investors want better returns.
I don’t understand why people with money have to make more money with out any physical work. I suggest that instead of beating up with the people at the bottom of the “skills” pyramid you should look towards the top. Them maybe you can get the COLA you deserve.
I’m not sure $13.80 is top union wages. I’m think drivers for Murphy Mechanical Engineers (Murphy Plumbing) make on the order of $20 an hour, that is the teamsters union. In any case $13.80 an hour is hardly more than a basic wage. What is that maybe $26,000 a year? Big deal, it is hardly a luxurious salary, let’s see a family of four can afford maybe a beat up old car, a very modest house or apartment and if they are lucky go out once in a while.
I have to agree with BeanCounter, the top end are the ones that need their salaries chopped. Along with everything else the government has special laws and tax breaks designed to put even more money in their pockets.
Nor is there such a thing as a free market except for the lower classes. American workers competing with Chinese working for a dollar a day is the result of government policy and beneficial to just a few. A time in the future when wages become equal worldwide, manufacturing will become decentralized and return to America to service the markets they are near. High energy costs may cause this to happen even sooner, if energy becomes more expensive than labor.
Otherwise I guess we should just pay everyone $5 an hour and build shanty towns and kiss the feet of the wealthy rulers as they pass.
I obviously hit a nerve here. One, $13.80 is not the top wage, it’s the starting rate, as advertised on the various websites. It’s also a lot higher than the starting pay at most fast-food places, where both the required skill sets and expected work outputs are similar. Two, I think we agree on the micro (“me”) level that we all want stable, well-paying jobs that offer good benefits. Three, where we do appear to “part company” is what role government should play in offering and continuing to provide the stable, well-paying jobs we all want. On the macro level, I want government to be both compassionate AND efficient. As long as government and its employees can deliver quality services AND (continue to) pay its employees “working” wages without coming back to the voters and asking for more taxes, I’m fine with it. Where I draw the line is when efficiency is sacrificed and taxes go up. UPS is a highly unionized and successful company. They are because they continually strive to maximize how efficiently they deliver their services. Their employees work hard and are paid well for their efforts. I would expect the same from “my” employees, the ones that my taxes pay for. I don’t know how efficient or inefficient St. Louis’ trash collection system is, or how much they’ve embraced efforts to become more efficient. My big point is that we can’t and don’t know if they’re not forced to compete with the private sector. The city has the advantage of being a “non-profit” operation – they don’t have stockholders who expect to receive a dividend. And if our trash system is working hard and is relatively efficient, there’s no reason why they should fear an effort to look at privatizing the delivery of this service.
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Getting back to the original discussion, by providing “free” trash services to its residents, St. Louis is unwittingly encouraging the production of more waste. When we lived in Kirkwood, we had to buy special bags for our yard waste – there was a direct cost for every bag we filled. The result is that we have a mulching lawn mower (that I still use) instead of a the side bagger my wife wants and thinks we need to live up the “standards” of our south-city neighbors. The same goes on the household side – with a dumpster in the alley, capacity is rarely an issue. Cardboard that could be broken down and recycled ends up in the dumpster simply because it’s easier and there are no direct cost impacts. The flipside is that no government service is “free”. We pay higher taxes because we recycle less. But because there is such a disconnect between the taxes going in and the trash being picked up, none of us understands its true cost. And because cost is a big motivator to many people, knowing that cost would motivate more people to generate less waste.
.
Finally, for BeanCounter, this is an article that illustrates my point well: http://www.denverpost.com/search/ci_7705072
Taxpayers’ patience for continuing tax increases is not infinite: http://www.sptimes.com/2008/01/31/Hillsborough/We_got_message__local.shtml
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Next Tuesday’s latest request to increase our local sales tax (up to 8.2%!) will be interesting to watch. As the article in today’s Post-Dispatch points out, even some of those who would benefit directly offer only lukewarm support . . .
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