What sends me is that he's still paying an extra $75, which means it's not about the garbage.
this post was submitted on 20 Jan 2024
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I guess it's about the convenience? Trash day only once a month does sound pretty tempting...
But it sounds way more involved than putting a bin to the curb. Also, if you're compressing it anyways you can probably fit a months worth of garbage into one bin.
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Isnt throwing garbage free?
(At least here in Greece it is.)
In the USA, you usually pay for garbage collection services which are private companies that provide you trash and recycling bins and they pick them up from your house on a regular schedule, usually once or twice a week. If you live in a rural area, really rural, you might need to handle your own garbage. In these cases you either haul it in your truck to a dump where you either pay a flat rate to dump, or pay by the pound (they weigh your car before and after), or some places allow you burn trash if you’re really in the middle of nowhere.
Sometimes payment for these services is included in rent, HOA fees, or sometimes you hire/pay seperately.
In the USA, you usually pay for garbage collection services which are private companies that provide you trash and recycling bins
what the hell
This varies heavily by location. I'm not sure "usually" comes into it. In and around cities it's not uncommon for the city government to handle trash collection. Farther out into the 'burbs or in rural locations you might have to hire a private trash company.
What, too much freedom for you to handle?
yeah we got like 6 companies that take care of trash in my neighborhood
I probably should shop around I'll bet one of them is cheapest
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In Australia we pay about $700 a year to the local government to collect the bins
worth noting though this is not like a “you sort it out” thing or anything… it’s basically a tax
*council. It's part of your rates. My last were like $150 for recyc/garbage/green
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It can also be included as part of your taxes as well. I used to live literally 1 street over from where the official city limits were (a whole 1 mile from downtown), and while the city provided trash/recycling services within that boundary, anyone outside had to pay like $30/mo for a private service that only did trash pickup, and had to pay another $12/mo for recycling.
In my new town, we're on the very outskirts of the city, but it's all provided by the city as part of our property taxes. We get recycling, trash, and compost services. Best part is you even get 1m³ compost and mulch from the city from the compost service. We grew an absolutely insane amount of vegetables from it last year, it was really awesome.
This is never something I'd have even thought about being privatised, I guess I just assumed it was always in the interest of local authorities to make sure there isn't just shit piling up everywhere and pay for it through taxation. It's also surely much more cost effective to centralise.
Today I not only discover that isn't the case, but that you also commonly have to pay extra to recycle. Like what?! Do poorer people have to just not have their bins collected? Or make a choice about whether things get recycled?!
This has absolutely blown my mind!
If you take it to a refuse & recycling centre yourself (I assume those exist with public access), do you have to pay for that too?!
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I live in the US and garbage collection is free in my city and many others.
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What do you think the US some socialist country?! Everything must be a private country because... Capitalism! No "socialized" waste disposal here!
Of course...? Trash collection has to be paid for, either privately or publicly, e.g. taxes. There's an Australian commenter below who pays almost double what I do as a yearly tax. In any case, you can always opt to deal with your own waste.
For example, I could burn, recycle and compost most of it for free. I make mulch from yard waste, ditch metal by posting on FB Marketplace, Craigslist, etc., for the scrap metal guys to grab.
Same for serviceable goods. Just put out some lawn chairs that I don't have the tooling to repair, and they're gone. I used to pick up old vacuum cleaners and repair them for a few dollars, give them to friends and neighbors or sell 'em for $20. (Great little side hustle. 95% of them just need a deep clean, new belt and bag.)
I've picked up a literal ton of stuff that's not good enough for one's home but works great at my camp in the boondocks. Got my wife a new TV yesterday and converted the Styrofoam packing into napalm for starting campfires.
I have two companies to choose from, because competition is good. $35/mo. covers my trash, and since my neighbor doesn't have much money, I let her use my cans. Call it <$20 per household. Think the government could operate that cheaply?
Buddy of mine drives around picking up old washers and dryers for free. Fixes and flips 'em for a nice profit. (This is hilariously easy.) He clears $100+ a pop, and people save $200-$400 on a new machine. Win-win.
In my area, if the government handled it all for "free", all that creative recycling/upcycling would end up in a landfill. Because who would give a shit? When you have to pay out your pocket for disposal it motivates you to think. Why would I bother rinsing and crushing my cans for personal profit if the govenment made them go away for free?
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U.S. truly is a hypercapitalist hellhole. I'm so glad I don't live there.
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Sometimes payment for these services is included in rent, HOA fees, or sometimes you hire/pay seperately.
Or included in property tax, because (as a matter of public health) they really don't want anybody to be able to avoid paying it.
In my city, it's a flat fee per residence (as opposed to scaling with the millage rate), so it's broken out on a separate line-item. It's a little over $500/year.
That's weird. Not sure where you are. Where I live the city just adds it to the utility bill (trash, sewer, and water). That sounds like it's probably expensive. Fuck that.
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Ohh ok ok. Yeah, very different from Greece. Probably because Greece isn't that much of a capitalistic country I think🤷. We just have some big trash cans (around 1m³ of volume) every like 50meters (±40meters) in residential areas and trucks pick up the garbage.
They are by the streets/in indetations of the pavement (I've seen in other european countries, that they have those trash cans inside an apartment complex instead and other stuff. We had hard time figuring out where to throw our trash in Hungary).
Though people doesnt care very much of what they dispose of and frequnetly you can see stuff like big carboards and abandoned furniture near those trash cans which are rarely collected (many times you have to call the appropriate service of the municipalty).
We also have those small bins (around 50liters) on the pavement scattered around in the cities where you can throw various small garbage.
Some municipalities in the US may also have public trash collection similar to what you describe. It varies a lot from place to place.
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In certain countries you’ll get fined for dumping garbage, which is why divorce is so expensive.
I've lived in a few places in Canada and I've never heard of paying for trash pickup, it's just a city service.
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Depends on where you live. Rural areas often don’t get free trash pickup.
re malaka you pay tax money for services of this kind, it is not free
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What an asshole
Is $125 a month "normal" for houses? I pay $8 but I live in an apartment
Ours is paid for by taxes and council fees
In IB, California, I'm paying $105 every three months for 1 trash and 1 recycling bin. With weekly pickup.
A quick Google tells me that in NYC trash companies are limited to $15.89 per hundred pounds.
Either OP has Oscar the Grouch levels of trash to dispose of, or the whole thing is made up.
My guess is that they’re rural. Lots of rural communities have such high trash fees that they’ll opt to just burn it instead. Because no trash company wants to drive 45 minutes outside of town just for one pickup, and the local municipality doesn’t cover them because they’re outside of the city limits.
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Where we live is between $40-$50 every two months for trash and recycling for most services.
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We pay zero, but what can I say, I'm living in a third world country. Trash is everywhere.
I pay $85 a quarter for a huge trash can and a huge recycling can (the kinds with wheels that’d hold at least a couple bodies). They pickup once a week.
I live in a major city and pay $75 quarterly for trash and recycling bins that are picked up weekly semi-reliably. They get a lot of holidays for being an American company and anytime there’s even the hint of inclement weather they cancel pickup and I have a full bin of trash for another week lol and of course I can’t leave the bin out where it don’t smell up my garage because the HOA doesn’t allow the bins to be outside during daytime except pickup day and it must be placed back inside by the day after pickup because these people have nothing going on with their lives
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I wish my mom actually followed though on sending my brussels sprouts to the starving kids via mail when I was a kid because it would have been hilarious.
This is basically how recycling works, except it goes to Indonesia and is put into massive piles that occasionally set on fire.
So that's where all trash on the roads of India come from
I knew a billion people couldn’t do that, there had to be someone else
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