City Sues Man for Cancelling Trash Service

reply to post by goosdawg


What exactly makes the city doing something anyone can do "more green?" Maybe it's more "green" for them in that they can profit from your trash.

Looks like the municipal brainwashing has gotten to you too.

reply to post by goosdawg


Here's the thing though. Ronald Reagan really came about popularizing this whole black and white law system. Do it and your guilty, not and you're not. I think we need to get back to not such a black and white way of doing things.

It is understandable what you're saying, and you make a very good point, but in THIS situation where the city's fears are NOT the case, this man should not be getting sued.

Hmmm, I think that made more sense in my head. Basically, you make a good point about why it has to be on a weekly basis, but they should look at it on a more individual basis. If this man is not producing the trash, he shouldn't be forced to. I guess that stuff will be determined in the suit though.

Originally posted by Extralien
reply to post by bigbert81

 

Did he sign a contract agreement form with Allied to take his rubbish away weekly?

If not then Allied does not have a leg to stand on.

Good point, however there are now many ways around that type of thing.

I don't think in this situation, that he would've had to sign something. There's probably some regulations or something like that to cover signatures.

I could be wrong though.

Originally posted by thisguyrighthere
What exactly makes the city doing something anyone can do "more green?"

I'll answer your question with a question of my own...

What's more green, more efficient; one vehicle collecting the trash and making one trip to the dump for a hundred households or, a hundred vehicles making a hundred trips to the dump?

Now multiply that times the actual size of the community.

Originally posted by thisguyrighthere
Maybe it's more "green" for them in that they can profit from your trash.

And how would you go about "profiting from" your trash then?

Originally posted by thisguyrighthere
Looks like the municipal brainwashing has gotten to you too.

What did I propose that deserved an ad hominem attack?

Kindly stick to the issue, okay?

reply to post by bigbert81


Perhaps he should petition for the establishment of some type of waver from the municipal statute such as; if one can demonstrate that their actions/life style generate so little refuse that it is more efficient to not require trash collection, then that might be an avenue to pursue.

Using his reasoning; if I'm never out after dark, why should I have to pay for streetlighting?

Or, if I don't have kids, why should I pay for schools?

Pooling our resources, for the good of the community in which we reside, just makes sense.

Originally posted by goosdawg
What's more green, more efficient; one vehicle collecting the trash and making one trip to the dump for a hundred households or, a hundred vehicles making a hundred trips to the dump?

Now multiply that times the actual size of the community.

Well, I don't know. I'd have to look at the emissions for those 2-ton garbage trucks. I'm pretty sure they don't get 20 mpg. Those trucks are out every week. In some neighborhoods twice a week. Fleets of them from more than one source. I remember when we were still free to bring our own trash I made maybe one trip a month. Will there be people there every two days? Sure. Will there people there quarterly? Absolutely. Some people who don't currently give a damn will continue to not give a damn and toss their trash in the street by the bag full. Others who don't currently give a damn might enjoy receiving cash back for their scrap metal products.

And how would you go about "profiting from" your trash then?

There's money to be made in metals and organic waste. And bulk plastics and glass have industrial uses up the wazoo. People don't recycle because it's fun or because of some idealistic altruistic drive. They recycle because there is profit to be had. Small profit for you and me but in bulk there is a lot of money.

What did I propose that deserved an ad hominem attack?
Kindly stick to the issue, okay?

Eh. You'll get over it.

reply to post by goosdawg


Huh, good point. Crap, you're making this tough.

Trash pickup is a bit different however than street lights. Hell, this guy deserves to save money, at the very least, if he doesn't produce trash every week. It's a different scenario. His methods are something that should be encouraged.

And you are correct about him having to go through more steps than just canceling his service. I don't see a problem with him having to demonstrate that he doesn't need trash pickup.

Would it get more complicated with my suggestion? Definitely. This is something that obviously still has some bugs that need to be worked out.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


When was the last time you sat in line at the dump with hundreds of other vehicles, idling, waiting for your turn to go, on a nice Saturday when you could be doing other things?

How efficient is that?

Actually a garbage truck can weigh up to 25 tons.

The frequency of their visits is based upon the need for their services.

Where would everyone store their trash if they only hauled it out once a month?

How would you like to live next to someone who only hauls their garbage out once every six months, or never?

The reasoning behind municipal trash hauling should be self-evident, just like in-door plumbing and paying for fire services you may never use.

Originally posted by thisguyrighthere
There's money to be made in metals and organic waste. And bulk plastics and glass have industrial uses up the wazoo. People don't recycle because it's fun or because of some idealistic altruistic drive. They recycle because there is profit to be had. Small profit for you and me but in bulk there is a lot of money.

What's to stop you from profiting from the items you can recycle?

I do.

I set aside all the deposit recyclables and cash them in when I get enough stored up to make the trip worthwhile.

We have three separate bins in my community:

Brown for trash, gray for non-deposit recyclables, and green for organic waste, leaves, grass clippings, that sort of thing.

Brown and green are picked up once a week, the gray are picked every other.

If you don't have anything to be picked up you don't put the bin out and the truck drives right by.

Originally posted by goosdawg
When was the last time you sat in line at the dump with hundreds of other vehicles, idling, waiting for your turn to go, on a nice Saturday when you could be doing other things?

I've never had to wait. Pull up, there might be a dozen people there, empty your stuff, get your money and leave.

The frequency of their visits is based upon the need for their services.

Where would everyone store their trash if they only hauled it out once a month?

I think you got your wires crossed or read something wrong. They come now whether you need them or not. If your trash was your responsibility you'd take care of it as you needed to. Not force people to store their crap for months at a time. Week after week that "25 ton" truck comes by to pick up a n empty milk carton and a few sandwich baggies. I could keep the trash bin in the back until full but why? I'm paying for them to stop and idle in front of my house so I may as well get my moneys worth. If they want to charge me based on need we can talk but they obviously don't. They enjoy the waste.

I'm going to guess that you've been some kind of city boy your whole life living in little cubes one on top of the other like a bunch of chickens in a Perdue complex crapping on each others heads.

Sure if you live in some super-city with a population density so high the dead don't fall they stay propped up between the shoulders of other sardines packed in their concrete can of skyscrapers and parking lots but there is a growing number of large towns and small cities forcing mandatory trash collection on it's residents for the reasons I've already stated.

With regards to profiting from my own recyclables, for me to accumulate enough waste to profit from an industrial sale I would need a warehouse of trash. The best I can get is traveling way out of town with my truck full of metal. How's that for being "green?" Before forced collections I only had to travel a couple of miles.

My beef is we've got drones in the huge dense cities believing the rest of the country needs to live by their policies and due to their population density their policies do indeed get pressed on smaller municipalities. Once the smaller municipality discovers there's money to be made all hope of undoing what's been done is gone. It's because city people can't mind their own business. Sooner or later there won't be any safe town to flee to. It's already as hard as all get out to escape it and this example of mandatory government forced tax funded trash collection is just another bullet in my mag. Like anyone in NYC knows what's best for Boonevill, NY? Of course they don't. But NYC has way more influence in NY state than Boonville does. Thats how the whole country is ruled. L.A. and NYC are trying to tell Boonville how they should live from trash pickup to health care to firearms.

If somebody wants off the grid they should be able to get off the grid. Not sued until forced to comply with the status quo. Why not send armed IRS guys into his house to ruff him up a bit? Maybe demand some sort of retroactive pay with interest from him ruining his financial life?

reply to post by bigbert81


Well, I agree with the fact that this situation being handled by the court system is a stupid waste of resources, no pun intended.

However, if it should turn out that he is actually burning it on the sly, that scenario is when it should become an issue of enforcement, and if necessary, legal action.

There should be a system in place to encourage what he claims he's doing, that is, generating very little waste.

Perhaps a computer tracking system that weighs the trash as it's picked up, in conjunction with a sliding scale of charges depending on how much trash a household generates.

Hmmm, a laser scanner to read a barcode on each bin, a scale mechanism in the bin grabber arm feeding weight data via a secured up-link to a central data-base; it could be done.

The question then would be; how do you make it economically feasible to deploy such a system?

On a side note, I wonder how fat this guy's dog is?

Refuse collections are getting silly.

In the UK it is now normal to see lots of this going on...

only food waste will be collected on a weekly basis with all other rubbish picked-up fortnightly.

news.bbc.co.uk...

That's just one example.

The microchipping of refuse bins is also another problem.

South Kesteven District Council is using the bins to monitor how much people are recycling, with potential rewards for those who recycle well.

But one protester claims they will eventually be used to charge people for the amount they throw away.

news.bbc.co.uk...

And according to this, it seems that to save yourself some cash, just put your rubbish in someone else's bins..

Household rubbish would be weighed to within 500 grams on collection trucks and the chips used to identify which property the bin belongs to.

But Paul Bettison, chairman of the Local Government Association's environment board, appreciates that certain councils have taken the wrong approach.

"Any council that's issued chipped bins and hasn't informed their residents I would say has scored something of an own goal. We need to work with the public and it's sad that seemingly some councils didn't," he said.

news.bbc.co.uk...

So what you supposed to do?
Do it offcialy and you'll not only buying a product, but also paying to throw it away too. You may as well not buy anything or throw anything away.

If you took your refuse to a large collection bin situated very close to a large shopping centre and deposited your rubbish there before buying more rubbish, that might save everyone some money.

Apparently, the UK has only got 9 years of landfill space left available.

reply to post by thisguyrighthere


Okay, I can see you're projecting bigger issues onto this situation other than just trash pick-up.

Firstly though, I'd like to know where you can go to dump your trash and get paid for it!?

We always had to pay for the privilege, and there was always a wait even on weekdays.

Our nearest neighbors were a quarter mile away, so storing it up to make an efficient sized load was never a problem.

You'd be floored if you were to know the true circumstances of my background; you're sooo far off it's absurdly comic.

But I'm gonna guess that you live in a semi rural area that's been forced to accept trash pick-up, no?

Is there development coming into your area?

New houses and strip-malls going up?

Got a wak-mart yet?

With the truck coming to haul it away, if you got nothing for them, why would they have to stop and idle?

Are they manual trucks with two guys tossing it in from random sized, customer supplied cans or robo trucks with grabber arms, company supplied standardized bins, and one operator?

I can see where you're coming from, though, I really can.

The tough thing about getting off the grid, besides the fact the PTB don't want to make it easy for you, is the only way to do it without hassles is to move away from developed areas.

And when development catches up to you, you've got to move again.

And that's from personal experience.






[edit on 1-2-2008 by goosdawg]

Originally posted by goosdawg
Firstly though, I'd like to know where you can go to dump your trash and get paid for it!?

Recycling centers. I make somewhere between 300 and 500 extra dollars every year turning in my cans, glass bottles and plastics. Those things are commodities and I get paid by the pound. I just took in 4 kitchen trash bags of cans and got paid 62 cents a pound - made 41 dollars. Not sure where you live but I live in a moderate city in the USA. All cities have recycling centers and they can be found in the yellow pages of a phone book. You can recycle a ton of materials for money.

[edit on 1-2-2008 by zerotime]

reply to post by zerotime


Thanks, I do recycle.

I was referencing the statement posted by thisguyrighthere wherein he mentioned:

I remember when we were still free to bring our own trash I made maybe one trip a month.

and I replied:

When was the last time you sat in line at the dump with hundreds of other vehicles, idling, waiting for your turn to go, on a nice Saturday when you could be doing other things?

To which thisguyrighthere replied:

I've never had to wait. Pull up, there might be a dozen people there, empty your stuff, get your money and leave.

To which, in turn I asked:

Firstly though, I'd like to know where you can go to dump your trash and get paid for it!?

So, to recap, I was talking about trash all along and apparently he misunderstood my question and switched to the subject of recyclables.

Sorry for the confusion!

You see I don't consider recyclables trash, never have.

I've been recycling since I was kid in the seventies.

We use to collect the newspapers and bottles from all our neighbors and haul 'em into the recycling center, even back then.

Never was much money in it, but it makes you feel good to know that crap won't wind up in a landfill somewhere, that's what I really do it for.

The pocket change is handy though.

I used to do that.

10 pence on every soda bottle returned. Used to spend all day Saturday and Sunday riding around hunting bottles. Had great fun, got me outside in the fresh air, gave me exercise and some money at the end of the day to do as i pleased.

Then along came the shopping trolleys with the 1 pound deposit coins stuck in them.

Could clear 10 quid a day if you could beat all the other kids to the lost trolleys first. This also helped to stop trolleys being thrown into the rivers.