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Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food
schwit1 writes The new rules would allow garbage collectors to inspect trash cans and ticket offending parties if food and compostable material makes up 10 percent or more of the trash. The fines will begin at $1 for residents and $50 for businesses and apartment buildings. "SPU doesn’t expect to collect many fines, says Tim Croll, the agency’s solid-waste director. The city outlawed recyclable items from the trash nine years ago, but SPU has collected less than $2,000 in fines since then, Croll says. 'The point isn’t to raise revenue,' he said. 'We care more about reminding people to separate their materials.'"
Even for the samzenpus failure machine, this article is terrible. In this case, the headline is a complete fabrication that does not reflect the reality of the article it links to or the ordinance passed by Seattle City Council. Sure, samzenpus is a hacktacular idiot who has many times before posted various rallying calls for conservatives to come have a circle-jerk here at slashdot, but this is even terrible for him. Will his next posting to the front page be about the "latte salute" from Obama?
Samzenpus, isn't it time you go find a job you're qualified for? You certainly aren't qualified as an editor, even at this website. Fox News might be hiring... or maybe townhall.com?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Why does the headline pretend that it does? Didn't the person who posted this bother to read the article before passing it through to the front page?
And what does it have to do with technology?
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Coffee grinds alone probably make up 10%
The carrot instead of the stick of the law should be tried first: offer rewards for reporting rather than spankings for not. Laws like this just clog up police departments and courts, and probably increase insurance rates for trash collection companies.
Table-ized A.I.
And then immediately asking your city to take away for you, to a landfill, that they have to not only manage and use the space for, but be responsible for the environmentla stewardship of for decades afterwards.
You buy and safely manage your own private dump, and then you can throw as much compost out as you want.
So, is the 10% limit by weight or volume?
And how are the trash collectors supposed to determine whether it's 9% or 11%?
Oh, and are they going to be opening plastic garbage bags to check the contents? Or are plastic garbage bags already illegal in Seattle?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
I'm a pretty big critic of fellow environmentalists who get carried away with authority, sometimes actually doing environmental harm in the pursuit of theory (e.g. ROHS, removal of recycled content lead from circuit boards, replaced with tin mined from Indonesian coral islands, oy vey. Like replacing plastic with "organic, natural" baby seal pelts).
However, in defense of the enviros and the article posted on /., organic waste really is a pretty cutting edge activity. A century ago pig farmers actually collected significant amounts of food waste, and until very recently the Egyptian Zabaleen community (Coptic Christians) ran a hugely successful organic waste collection system in Cairo. It was a fairly recent innovation to put recyclables and organics and junk into "landfills" and incinerators. It's legitimate to study public policy and efforts to achieve more sustainable cities.
When I was in charge of a state recycling program in the 90s (MA DEP), however, I found that rewarding positive behavior got better publicity than "fines" for not recycling. We ran a "recycling lottery" in Somerville where they'd choose a household at random and if they had their recyclables out, they got $200. It generated the awareness the Seattle fine is trying to achieve without the Drudge-Report-iness. It's also easier to backtrack if the whole thing turns out to be a mistake, if you've given out prizes for affirmative behavior instead of fines.
Gently reply
A vital detail that those outside the city (and many within it) don't know - and of course won't get from the inflammatory OMG! NANNY STATE! headline/summary - is that the City of Seattle doesn't have a local landfill. Hasn't for many years; there's no nearby space. Instead, all garbage is loaded onto train cars - hundreds of them a day - and sent by rail to a landfill in rural Oregon, about 250 miles away. That was the cheapest alternative for the city, even though it involves paying twice (once to transport it, and again to the landfill operator). But it's still expensive.
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Given that it's in the best interest of the City _and_ its ratepayers to reduce the amount of landfillable waste (aka number of train cars) in favor of more economic alternatives; specifically, recycling and composting, both of which are able to be handled within a few dozen miles of the city, at much lower cost than the landfill trains. The alternative is to have even more and longer trains and higher rates for garbage for everyone.
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Kind of the opposite of a nanny state; this is pure and simple economics. If the spectre of a few $1 fines for the few residents who can't be bothered to separate their greasy pizza boxes into another bin makes everyone's garbage rates lower, then I'm all for it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
. . . it seems the law is not intended to go after residents who "waste food." It is intended to go after residents who put significant amounts of food into the trash bin instead of the food/yard waste bin, the same way it already went after people who were throwing away large amounts of recyclable glasses or cans.
Chicken leg quarters were on sale, so we cooked a bunch of them in the oven. We ate the chicken meat, and we made a soup from the pan drippings, but we now have a big pile of chicken bones.
I picked a whole bunch of apples off the ground from the home orchard. Since they have been on the ground, I peel them before eating them. Also, I haven't quite "turned the corner" in controlling the Apple Maggot Fly, so portions of the apples start rotting. I cut those part off, which generates even more food waste. That apple waste should not go in a home compost pile as it would just breed more apple maggot flies. Don't know of the hardiness of the larvae and pupae of this breed of fruit fly in a municipal composter. But if I had a home orchard let alone had apple maggots in it, in the State of Washington I would have already been lined up against the wall.
So I fill up a curbside bin with cooked chicken bones and apple peels, without the benefit of using a plastic grocery bag as "primary containment", besides, such bags are contraband too, and just brew a smelly mash of these items as I accumulate them in the bin in the week prior to garbage day.
Ewwwwwwww!