A 20th-century solution

On November 12, the Sullivan County Legislature approved a new user fee system for solid waste disposal, which will charge residents and businesses flat fees based on the type and size of the buildings on a property rather than on the quantity of trash disposed of.

The problem with a flat fee is that it provides no incentives either for recycling or for reducing the volume of garbage that can’t be recycled (see ../issues/09-04-02/editorial.shtml). It is like an all-you-can-eat buffet, charging one price regardless of the consumption behavior—or in this case, the disposal behavior—of the clientele.

Apparently, there is some possibility that the legislature will lower the proposed flat fees and make up the difference by adding a tipping fee component. This would be a step in the right direction. Tipping fees have the advantage of providing incentives for households and businesses to reduce the garbage they generate and increase the proportion they recycle—with the disadvantage that those incentives are experienced only by those who haul their garbage themselves.

For those households and businesses, Sullivan County’s current system is already environmentally state-of-the-art. That’s because it is “Pay as You Throw” (PAYT): what garbage disposal costs you is directly proportional to how much you throw away. Ironically, PAYT is the hottest new idea in waste management, being touted by a variety of environmental groups and agencies, including the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). It is viewed as a huge step forward from the antiquated flat-fee systems that have prevailed for decades in more urbanized environments—and to which Sullivan is now planning to regress.

We should be enhancing the PAYT feature, not eliminating it. If a flat fee component is necessary to generate a base income stream, fine, but let’s reduce it, add a tipping component, and then find ways to make the costs of people who use commercial haulers proportional to what they throw out. Other municipalities that have recently adopted PAYT have done this by techniques like requiring garbage to be thrown away in easily identifiable bags, or bags with distinctive stickers, purchased from the waste authority. This allows both commercial haulers and waste authority personnel to easily monitor whether garbage has been paid for—and sees to it that the cost is born by the party that generates it on a per-unit basis.

Neighboring Rockland County adds another good idea: providing rebates for recycling. According to Anna Roppolo, executive director of the Rockland County Solid Waste Management Authority, the rebates are given to municipalities that collect the recyclables at a rate of $32 a ton. This is a step in the right direction, but it still doesn’t get the rebates back to the individual household or business where they would have the most impact. Better yet would be a proposal like that included by Sullivan County Manager David Fanslau in the materials sent out with the 2010 budget: “a credit could be authorized for the amount of recyclable materials deposited at the MRF [municipal recycling facility] from a real property parcel, individual, and or business, etc.”

Legislative chair Jonathan Rouis has said that to begin with, incentives to increase recycling are not practical for Sullivan County because it does not yet have the facilities to deal with such an increase. But the need to delay such a system is no reason to delay planning for it, and we hope the legislature takes note of Fanslau’s recommendation.

Time is too short for the legislature to implement anything too complicated at the outset, but we would like to see it set up a timeline for putting in a PAYT component and a rebate for recycling. The first step in this direction would be to adopt a hybrid system with both a flat fee and a tipping fee. The second would be to adopt the use of special bags or stickers that would make sure the tipping fee operates as a PAYT incentive for all. To the extent that PAYT is being promoted by the EPA, stimulus dollars may even be available to help us out with implementation. And the final step would be to come up with a recycling rebate system ready to go as soon as full-scale recycling facilities are in place.

The one thing we shouldn’t do is to adopt a flat fee system and simply leave it at that. That would leave Sullivan hurtling back toward the environmental dark ages while everybody else is passing us in the opposite direction. In a county that has sought to position itself at the forefront of the green movement, this would be a particularly ironic blunder.

Also in this issue:

• Environmentalists for gas drilling

Dr. Punnybone

Boom Box