Re:I'd like to start a company that takes care of your trash
by samlev on Thursday December 22, 2011 @11:50AM
(#3382183)
Daily pickup could also lead to people throwing out more stuff because they don't have to ration their bin space.
Where I'm living in the UK, there's four bins: Plastics, glass, cans (collected once a month); Paper, cardboard, etc. (collected once a month); Green and food waste (collected once a week); General trash (collected once a fortnight)
In Germany and a number of other places, they go to the effort of getting people to separate green, brown, and 'white' glass, also.
Also, in many places, "curbside sorting" of the type you describe already takes place. Here in Norway, I get three trash bins from the city-- one for regular trash, one for paper, and one for food trash. About 25 years ago I lived in Montpelier, Vermont and there we had two streams-- one for recyclables like paper, plastic, and metal cans, and one for everything else. Both of these are based on weekly pickups-- daily pickups would be prohibitively expensive, it seems to me, and would also enlarge the environmental footprint (in terms of fuel required.)