In a Jan. 5 Bangor Daily News OpEd, Luisa and Ron Deprez questioned the effectiveness and fairness of pay-as-you-throw waste reduction programs, but their analysis is flawed in several important ways.
As mayor of Portland when the city began its pay-as-you-throw program in 1999, I can say from direct experience that everything we have seen there over more than a decade-and-a-half refutes the Deprezes’ claims. Pay-as-you-throw is the single best way for Maine cities and towns to reduce waste, save money, and offer a fair solid waste option for their residents.
According to the authors, pay-as-you-throw is “rarely used in cities and towns across the country that boast better success in increasing recycling levels.” This is far from the case.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency states that pay-as-you-throw “has proven to be the single most effective way to reduce residential solid waste, increase recycling and decrease waste-related greenhouse gas emissions.” We saw this in Portland, where the recycling rate jumped from just 7 percent before pay-as-you-throw to 37 percent after the program was adopted.
And we are not an outlier in this; as the BDN reported in July 2015, recycling in my home town of Brewer jumped by an eye-popping 285 percent after the city began its pay-as-you-throw program in 2011. Indeed, this trend holds true nationwide.
The Deprezes also write that pay-as-you-throw has an “adverse effect on the poor, seniors, and others less able to afford the price of the required bags.” This is demonstrably untrue.
In Portland, the average household spends just $0.88 more on trash bags each week than does the average household in a non-pay-as-you-throw city. Pay-as-you-throw offers low-income residents an opportunity they do not have with traditional solid waste payment systems — to control their spending on trash by taking steps such as recycling, composting and donating textiles.
And far from being hurt by pay-as-you-throw, seniors are actually the population that benefits the most from the program’s inherent fairness advantage. On average, older residents are more likely to throw away less trash than the general population. With a traditional fixed-fee solid waste payment system, they are forced to pay the same amount as others who may create much more garbage. With pay-as-you-throw, however, they are able to pay only for the small amount of waste they produce—a significant opportunity for financial savings.
As the BDN has reported, about a third of Mainers live in a city or town that uses pay-as-you-throw, and those communities see an average solid waste reduction of between 40 percent and 55 percent. The program is popular in Maine because it is effective, financially advantageous for residents, and more fair and equitable than traditional solid waste payment systems. It is hard to understand how the Deprezes look at all those benefits and see pay-as-you-throw as a negative. The state of Maine could only benefit if pay-as-you-throw were to expand to the two-thirds of residents whose communities have not yet adopted the program.
George Campbell has served as mayor of Portland and as president of the Maine Municipal Association. In addition to his public service, Campbell has worked in the private sector, where he has led multiple successful public-private partnerships.