UPDATE: Would you throw out trash if you had to pay by the bag?
When you live on an island, there’s only so much space to stash waste.
The city is working on a few different fronts to reduce the waste stream flowing to the landfill — whether by encouraging people to recycle more or using different technologies to reduce the volume of Honolulu’s trash.
On an older thread on curbside recycling, Civil Beat member Olin Lagon suggested opening discussion on a pay-as-you-throw program used in other communities because Hawaii residents throw out perhaps twice as much a day per person as the national average. You can read more of our discussion here, but I agreed that we should break it out into its own topic.
The Environmental Protection Agency he pointed me to explained how that sort of program charges households by the amount of trash they have collected — perhaps charging by the can or bag.
That sort of service gives people more of an incentive to waste less, since it’s a more tangible pocketbook issue than paying a flat rate bill for trash collection or having it folded into property taxes, as in Honolulu.
It’s an interesting idea. Is it something you’d want to see in Honolulu?
Join the discussion on Honolulu-related issues here .
