Cap and trade—for trash?

Sullivan County’s recent proposal to overhaul its waste disposal system strikes us as a realistic approach to a tough problem. It ensures the needed revenue flow, spreads the financial pain as widely as possible (including tax-exempt properties), spares the landfill’s neighbors more noxious fumes and heads toward recovering 70 percent of our waste stream as recyclables, compared to the current 8.5 percent.

Our chief concern, however, is with the flat fee structure. The problem with imposing a flat fee for anything is that, by definition, the frugal users subsidize the profligate users. That’s not just a fairness problem, it’s a practical one: charge a flat fee and there is no incentive to conserve on the item in question, kind of like an all-you-can-eat buffet.

One could argue that, as long as recycling is strictly enforced, people just won’t have a chance to become garbage hogs. But the report projects that though an estimated 58 percent of our garbage stream consists of recyclable paper and containers, we probably will only recover about 35 percent—even with stricter enforcement. (Compostable organic waste is projected to make up the balance of the projected 70 percent recycled.) There’s a lot of leeway in there for incentives to make a difference.

Moreover, consumption patterns are at least as important as recycling in determining how many tons go into landfills. Disposability is a key element of our lifestyle. Items such as paper towels and Swiffer pads, vacuum filters, coffee filters, air fresheners and disposable cameras add up to a lot of tonnage.

Reduce or eliminate such items, compost all organic waste and recycle assiduously and it is possible for a single-person household to reduce its trash to one 30-gallon bag every two months or so. At the current coupon-book rate, that’s about $12 a year plus gas for trips to the transfer station. Even for larger households, the increase to the proposed $180 or so per single-family property is barbarically punitive to those who have cut their trash production to the bone—and does nothing to encourage others to do likewise.

Is there any way to implement the county plan while still retaining an incentive to less wasteful behavior?

There are two difficulties in coming up with such a solution. First, we need to assure a regular and predictable income to run the county’s waste disposal system, and collecting an annual fee up front from all may be the only feasible way to meet that need. That means that any rewards or incentives would have to come at the back end—issuing rebates, say, in proportion to how much less than a certain threshold of garbage a property has produced in a year. It also means having to develop a system to track how much trash is produced per property.

But the proposal already acknowledges that it will be necessary to keep track of the quantity of garbage each fee-payer produces, to see to it that no one disposes too much. If you have to keep track of how much, you can also keep track of how little. So a tracking system shouldn’t be an obstacle.

But there’s one more problem. If the county issues rebates to those who have been frugal, while keeping the per-property charges at the levels proposed, it might not meet the income targets needed to pay off debt, recycle and export trash. To address this issue, we’ve come up with another idea: cap and trade.

There are some households and businesses in the county that can, and will if encouraged, produce very little garbage; others must produce more or are simply not willing to produce less. How about instituting a system in which everybody, in return for their fee, receives a credit of so and so many pounds of garbage per year—the cap—and then those who use less can trade off their excess to those who need it? In this case, the county would not have to pay to reward frugal behavior; the cap-and-trade marketplace would do so.

We know the idea might seem a little crazy, and we don’t know off the top of our heads how the logistics of such a market would work. What we do know is that, as sound as the Sullivan County waste disposal proposal seems in general, the disincentive to responsible behavior entailed in the flat fee is a gigantic flaw. If our idea is too crazy, we hope someone out there can work out a solution that addresses our communal problem while rewarding individual behavior that reduces our garbage footprint.

Also in this issue:

• My View: Greening the housing stock

Dr. Punnybone

Nincompoop