“Pay as you throw”

I’ve been meaning to get back to posting on unconsumption topics again, and here’s a good one: Cities reducing garbage with “pay as you throw” schemes. IHT columnist Elisabeth Rosenthal explains:

The basic concept is this: The more you throw away, the more you pay…Economists and environmental scientists say that communities have long made it too cheap and easy to dispose of trash, giving consumers the wrong incentives. Why shouldn’t garbage disposal be billed like gas or electricity, related to usage?

“Somehow garbage became viewed as a right rather than being conducted under a user fee system – and that has had terrible consequences,” said Lisa Skumatz of Skumatz Economics Research in Colorado.

Studies have shown that “pay as you throw” programs achieve the desired effect brilliantly. In a recent study, the amount trash in 100 communities that adopted the concept immediately went down by about 16 percent, Skumatz said.

One-third of the savings come from increased recycling, one-third from more composting and one-third from people relying more on items that are reusable or have less packaging.

Maybe there’s some counter-argument that makes this a bad idea, but it sounds pretty smart to me. Then again, it’s a systematic response, not an individual-empowering one, so I’m not sure how easy it would be to get people excited about it.