Waste Management

[danbrotherston]

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.

That doesn't solve the most egregious offence of people dumping outside of the bins when they aren't even close to full. But honestly, I'm not sure what logic they are using in the first place so I don't know how to approach solving that.

I wonder how the expense breakdown looks between what we do now for suburbs vs what I have vs what you linked with electrical and networking hookups.

And I'm curious if you know how often your trash ends up being collected? My underground bin is emptied every single night (usually a box truck has to come by to pick up the spillover by hand, then a crane truck for garbage, and a crane truck for recycling). I'm not sure how feasible it would be to do more often, particularly during the busy daytime I think the large crane trucks would have trouble fitting in.

Well it does in our city at least because everyone has access to the bins, and they're never full, so there is no reason to dump stuff...but I guess if they were used in only a few places, that would remain, but it isn't actually the bins causing that...people who are motivated to dump, don't actually care where it ends up, that's the whole point of dumping.

I'm sure networking is handled by cellular or smart city networking so the incremental cost is almost zero, as for power, the thing just has a small solar panel on top. The incremental cost of the electronics is minimal for the bin, although I'm sure building the server and software infrastructure for it would be more expensive.

Your bin gets emptied every night?! That's nuts! In Canada, our condo building had 2 small bins (half the size of a normal dumpster---they were sized so the superintendent could (just barely) wheel them around by hand), for a building of 65 two bedroom units, and they were emptied weekly (they were inside so we had limited additional dumping admittedly). Those bins were rarely overfilled. Being emptied every night seems extreme, I'm imagining a building holding 7 times as many people, and yet still only having a single standard sized dumpster, that seems like the fault of the developer cheaping out on garbage infrastructure.

As for our location here, I'm not actually sure how often it is emptied. They do so on an irregular schedule, so while I see it occasionally, I don't always see it emptied. I'm generally home 4 days a week, but I only see it emptied at most once a month, so extrapolating it's probably emptied a couple times a month is probably in the ballpark.

It's also worth noting that our recycling bins are collected only roughly monthly (paper is actually monthly, plastic + metal is every 4 weeks) and compost is collected every other week. I'm sure people would be up in arms about this idea in Kitchener, but it's really no big deal IMO, the bins are large enough they easily hold a months worth of stuff, and then the service is cheaper to provide. And the trucks which collect the compost (you know, with the big claw arm on them) are even electric.