Latimer Hoke: When Green Up Day is treated as free trash pickup day

This commentary is by Latimer Hoke of Milton.

In lieu of Adopt-a-Highway programs, Vermont has “Green Up Day.” It recently made WCAX news that the town of Milton had a noticeable problem with people dumping their household trash and piles of tires on the side of the road , treating Green Up Day as something of a “free trash pickup day.” I’m certain Milton was not the only town with this problem.

I recently moved home to Vermont after seven years in Montana. In Montana, I paid for use of the county landfill and transfer stations in my property taxes. They’d take everything for “free”: tires, hazardous waste, whole cars, appliances, and once per year they’d even take mobile homes, all without a fee at the point of disposal, because people had pre-paid for trash disposal in their taxes.

Montana’s system is not perfect. Recycling is lackluster. I’m pretty sure they just burn pressure treated lumber and plywood in open pits. There is no incentive to reuse products or donate perfectly good but unwanted items. The tax funding also meant that I had to pay for everyone else’s trash, even if I was mindful about my own wastestream.

On the flip side, when there is no fee at the point of disposal, people usually don’t throw their large junk items in the river, like they do in Vermont where disposing of a mattress can cost $20 or more. In Vermont, roadside dumping is common, partly because it’s so darned expensive to throw trash away. This creates other weird problems, like how if I decide to clean up litter other than the first weekend of May, my good deed will cost money in addition to my time. Why would I stop and pull a couple tires out of a creek if it’ll cost me $3 per tire for my efforts?

When I offered similar commentary to the Chittenden Solid Waste District about a year ago, part of the response included this: “Vermont has just one landfill remaining to serve our state’s trash disposal needs and it is privately owned by Casella Waste Systems. We must pay their disposal fees, which we then have to pass along to our customers to cover our costs.”

For one, that monopoly sounds problematic, but it’s also not true. There may be just one legal landfill, but there are many thousands of illegal dumping sites in Vermont. These landfills are in back pastures, dilapidated barns, forests, rivers and streams, fishing access sites, and down nearly every steep embankment on unpopulated stretches of gravel roads. There are trash heaps in front yards, backyards, even front porches and back bedrooms. Eventually someone will need to pay for all of this.

We could come up with all kinds of different systems to fund waste disposal. We could pressure companies to make more reusable packaging (or just less freaking packaging). We could have people prepay a disposal fee for every product, from takeout containers to tires and refrigerators. Or we could pay more in taxes to tackle this problem, but dang are taxes already crazy high here. (Where does all of that money even go?)

Sure, it’s simple and justified to hate the individuals who stack their tires on the side of the road on Green Up Day, but I also understand it a little bit. Life just continues to become more expensive, and making the trash someone else’s problem is a more affordable option. For those who have the space, the junk piles up for unknown persons to deal with in the future because it costs nothing to just leave it. For others who lack space, this looks like refrigerators in the river and trash dumped over the bank on a back road.

In a twisted way, it’s more polite if people dump their mattresses at roadside pull-offs, and stack their tires on the side of the road on Green Up Day. Since those people are choosing to make their trash a public problem, at least it’s easier to pick up. It’s not “right” by any means, but it is a case of simple behavioral economics: if people need to pay AT the transfer station, they are less likely to go to take their trash to the transfer station. If trash disposal is “free” one day per year, people will abuse that opportunity.

Every system has different incentives and trade-offs. In Montana, we had a few different landfills within a county the size of half of Vermont. Dumpster sites were scattered more regionally. The landfill was the only place for recycling, and the only place that received toxic waste and large items like appliances and furniture. Since some people would need to drive an extra 30 minutes to the landfill, obviously those dumpsters received lots of recyclables and toxic waste. Predictably, a few bad actors would just dump their vomit-covered sofas at the dumpster sites instead of driving to the landfill. But hey, that’s still better than chucking trash in the river.

Read the story on VTDigger here: Latimer Hoke: When Green Up Day is treated as free trash pickup day .