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‘Pay-As-You-Throw’ Helps Cities Cut Waste And Citizens Save Cash
In the northern suburbs of Sydney, Australia, Adam Bushell has saved about $10 a month in waste collection fees since his local council swapped flat fees for a “pay-as-you-throw” system four years ago. While recycling is collected free of charge, microchipped bins for general waste are weighed, and households receive a monthly statement listing how much they threw out and what they owe.
The new approach has changed the way Bushell thinks about household waste, not least when it comes to food.
“The pay-by-weight concept has made me very conscious of the amount of food that we waste and has really made me want to dispose of less,” says Bushell, who runs an electrical services company. “The personal financial cost definitely makes you think in a different way on what you discard. It makes it immediately, physically cost-effective to waste less.”
The system works thanks to several factors, first and foremost the clear financial incentive and rules, says Graham Matthews, head of content at U.K. commercial waste management company Business Waste. “Residents know and understand that the less trash they produce, the less they will pay. The system adheres to the principle of ‘polluter pays,’ meaning those who produce pollution should bear the costs of managing it.”
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Over the last 30 years, pay-as-you-throw waste systems have been gaining traction across the Netherlands, Germany, Ireland, Belgium, France, Italy and Norway, as well as Taiwan, Japan, Canada and the U.S. In the U.S., where over 7,000 towns and cities have implemented such programs, they have been praised as one of the most effective tools for encouraging residents to throw out less — in some cases, reducing the amount of household trash by 30 percent, as Lily Baum Pollans, associate professor of urban policy and planning at The City University of New York, has observed.
Meanwhile, Professor Baum Pollans’ research on municipal food scrap programming in mid-sized cities across the U.S. has found that pay-as-you-throw is the biggest predictor of whether or not a city would have a curbside composting program. In short, linking cost saving to waste reduction works when it comes to encouraging individual households to be more environmentally responsible, and municipalities to be more innovative.
“It comes down to neoclassical economics — the more you are asked to pay, the more you are willing to do to reduce the amount you pay,” explains Professor Baum Pollans. “We’re taught financial motivation from an early age, and the research does indicate that, at first, this is how people are motivated. But then, eventually, it results in new habits.”
Some people now call it “pay-as-you-waste,” she adds, because they want to make it clear that you’re paying for the garbage you produce, rather than for a basic collection system.
Bergen, Norway’s second-largest city, has introduced perhaps one of the most sophisticated forms of waste management. In 2016, the typical model of truck collection of trash bags and cans on the sidewalk was replaced with a network of underground tunnels running beneath the city center.
Bergen’s central residents are issued a key fob for opening collection hatches on the street. The fob keeps track of how many times an individual opens the hatch, with each household being allowed to use it eight times a month for free to dispose of general waste, after which they must pay. Items to be recycled can be disposed of for free. In 2022, six years into the program, the city recorded a nine percent decrease in residual waste, and a 28 percent increase in collected plastic.
Pay-as-you-throw waste systems such as Bergen’s have been praised as one of the most effective tools for cutting household waste.
“Financial incentives are more powerful than your own conscience. But the magic happens when you can align financial incentives with sustainable choices, and that’s when we will actually manage to change behavior the way we want,” says Tine Charlotte Holm, chief operating officer at Carrot, the software company behind Bergen’s system.
Carrot has now taken its pay-as-you-throw technology into office and retail buildings. Holm says these kinds of locations have traditionally been notorious for not recycling or making efforts to reduce waste, in part due to previous flat fee structures with waste management companies, but also thanks to an attitude of, “if my neighbor isn’t doing it, why should I?”
Now, using data to create friendly competition among neighbors seems to be working.
West One Shopping Center in central London, for example, has increased its mixed recycling volume by 47 percent and reduced general waste by more than 40 percent since introducing Carrot’s system, which weighs and tracks each type of waste, determining how much the center should pay their waste management company.
It also reduced its waste collection bill by close to $2,000 per month after shopping center management convinced fast food retailers to implement separated waste bins, increasing the amount customers are able to recycle. The retailers can log into the platform to see how much waste each individual business is generating, creating friendly competition and a further incentive to reduce their volumes.
“It’s about rewarding those who recycle and keep waste down, rather than punish[ing] anyone. It’s using positive reinforcement, and showing people and businesses that your action matters,” says Holm.
The next piece of the puzzle, she adds, is tracking the journey of the plastic collected to find out where it ends up.
It hasn’t all been good news. As Business Waste’s Matthews points out, South Norfolk county in the U.K. attempted to adopt a pay-as-you-throw system in 2012 but the scheme was scrapped after its initial trial period, despite the county having equipped each of its 12 garbage trucks with $34,000 worth of scanning technology. Much of the technology failed and caused issues with weighing the trash, leading to inaccurate readings, missed collections and general confusion amongst residents, which resulted in a 250 percent surge of illegal waste dumping in the local area.
“The scheme clearly lacked the technological infrastructure to support pay-as-you-throw, and alongside this, the U.K. media helped to whip up hysteria, with headlines branding the scheme ‘Big-Brother Bins’ and ‘Spy Bins,’” says Matthews.
While Carrot’s Holm believes there’s more to it than money, perhaps the effectiveness of financially motivated behavior change is simply the reality of the world we now live in. Or can values change over time, too? And does it even matter whether values change or not, if the behavior change creates a positive impact?
In South Korea, thanks to the country’s pay-as-you-throw system, 95 percent of all food waste and 86 percent of all garbage is recycled. In Gyeonggi, just outside Seoul, apartment dweller Allie Park purchases color-coded bags from her local grocery store to separate her recycling, food waste and general disposables. Her friends living in apartments in central Seoul, meanwhile, place their garbage in vending machines that charge users by weight and are opened by tapping a credit card.
Park, who writes about trends in and around the South Korean capital on her Kosi Coso Substack, recycles and separates her food waste out of duty, rather than with the belief she’s saving the planet, and she feels she’s not alone. She also questions the effectiveness of the local recycling policies.
“I am personally dubious as to whether even half of the so-called recyclables are actually reused or reborn into other materials.”
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Kuo-Hi Lee, who lives in an apartment in the Mapo area of Seoul, uses the vending machine system to dispose of her garbage. She says that the pay-by-weight system, combined with plentiful options for cheap eats in Seoul, encourages people to eat out more to avoid food waste at home — a sentiment echoed by Park.
Having lived in Germany and China, Lee finds the pay-as-you-throw system in South Korea relatively complicated, and says that there is a generally held view that reducing and separating waste is an obligation to avoid high charges rather than something people feel motivated to do for the sake of the environment.
“I don’t feel we are really incentivized. Also people aren’t that engaged — they believe they did their part and the government takes care of the rest.”
For Professor Baum Pollans, the biggest impact can be made at a corporate and commercial level — and that’s where she believes local governments can have the most influence in terms of how their laws and policies shape waste reduction on a larger scale. Pay-as-you-throw, she argues, is probably the most effective policy that a city can implement to eventually create more significant waste management changes.
“[It’s] what drives waste management departments to innovate, and then they start thinking not just about recycling and waste reduction, but how to reduce the amount of materials that are produced in the first place, and implementing policies for that,” she says. “So slowly, over time, it’s not individual-by-individual, it’s city-by-city that you start to change the market. That’s where I see a lot of possibilities.”
The post ‘Pay-As-You-Throw’ Helps Cities Cut Waste And Citizens Save Cash appeared first on Reasons to be Cheerful.
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