Waste Management

[danbrotherston]

I saw these in action while visiting a friend in Hamburg, and I think they're great - they kept the streets clean of all that visual (and literal) litter, and the trucks came by at like 7am to empty them out, but you can drop off your bags whenever they get full, so it's not like you need to be out at 6am to make sure the trash in on the curb. Everything sits underground so you don't see or smell it. I'd be in full support of moving to this kind of model, but I do think it would be an uphill battle to convince people to get onboard. Maybe if we started in the downtown cores and then slowly spread outwards?

I've complained about this before, but I can only laugh at some of your alleged benefits. I have these communal underground bins where I am downtown. I can't step out my back door without walking over trash that has blown over from the bins. Every time the property I live on gets cleaned up, the trash is all back in just a few days. I watch out my window all day and night and see countless vehicles, many clearly businesses from other areas, but also individuals, show up to dump their trash for free. I'd wager at least 30% of them don't even check if the bins are full and just dump all of their trash on the ground next to the bins (???). Makes my blood boil. Even on days where compliance with actually putting trash inside of the bins is high it still ends up overflowing (which means I can't take my own trash out whenever I want) because so many people are using it to avoid paying at the dump.

The overflowing garbage is also like a magnet for homeless people throughout the night. I don't inherently have any issue with this, but all too often they are ripping open bags and dumping the contents all over the ground. And worse is when they don't find anything, they almost always resort to checking the cars. When the cars are all locked, they resort to smashing my window to steal the absolute nothing I keep inside. Seriously, I can't afford to keep buying new windows...

Some of this overuse could be alleviated by having this option available elsewhere, but would make imposing free garbage limits impossible. And some of the appalling behaviour I see, I just don't know how you fix that.

Basically 100% of these issues are fixed with the designs we have in the Netherlands.

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1858405,...&entry=ttu

This is the end of my block, there is a bin here and one at the other end. The top pedestal is where you put your garbage. You scan a card, open the door put your bag in, close the door and the bag falls into the bin underneath.

Eventually a truck comes and pulls the whole thing out of the ground and empties.

We don't pay per bag, but we could because the card is tied to our address. There is no garbage coming out because you cannot get the garbage back out of the bin without a literal crane. Everyone with an address has a card, so the municipality would know if there was abuse, but you also physically cannot dump more than household waste. And because the bins are tapped every time they are used, the municipality knows when they are full.

Honestly this is one of the very many examples of a thing that is just obviously better here and I cannot explain why. Like sure, changing policies to built bike lanes and good cities is hard politically and socially, but this kind of thing isn't, there's no laws against it.

Again, not saying this, politically, would be even slightly an option for suburban homeowners but there are lots of condominiums and complexes where communal bins are used, and this would be a great solution there, and yet, it does not exist in the continent as far as I know.