The news that the average household in Harvard threw 37 pounds of waste per week into the trash compactors at the Transfer Station last year prompted me to take a look at my family of four’s weekly contribution. We regularly recycle glass, plastic, cans, and paper, so I figured we’d come in under average. I was wrong. Last Saturday we took 33 pounds of trash to the Transfer Station in four 10-gallon bags.
I wondered where we fell on the bags-of-trash-per-week curve, so later that day, I staked out a spot across from the trash compactors and counted the number of bags coming out of each vehicle for about half an hour. The results were surprising.
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I counted vehicles between 1:20 p.m. and 1:50 p.m. on Saturday afternoon. It was busy, so I wasn’t able to count the trash bags coming out of every vehicle, but I got an accurate count for 79 vehicles. The total bags thrown from those vehicles was 240.
Sixty-two percent of the vehicles threw just one or two bags; another 30 percent had between three and five bags; and the remaining 8 percent of the vehicles had six or more bags. The surprising part was what percentage of the total bags thrown came from those “six or more bags” people (see bar chart).
The people who brought fewer than six bags threw a total of 152 bags into the compactor. That’s about two-thirds of the total bags thrown. The remaining third, 82 bags, came from just seven vehicles. One had six bags, one had seven, one had nine, one had 10, one had 12, one had 13, and one, the jackpot pickup truck, had 25 bags. It may have been more—he was parked at the compactor farthest from the attendant’s office, and he was moving quickly, throwing three or four bags at a time.
What they tossed
The other surprise was what I saw going into the compactors. Ten of the 79 drivers threw something into the compactors that I could identify as illegal according to the posted signs. Everyone saw me with my notebook as they were driving in, and I suspect there would have been more illegal items thrown in if I hadn’t been there. Three people threw cardboard, and a fourth touched a big piece of cardboard in his trunk, looked around, then left with it still in his trunk. One man drove up in a pickup truck, emptied a couple of five-gallon plastic pails into the compactor, looked around, rearranged some things in the back of his truck, looked around some more, and left.
But some people didn’t seem to care who might be watching. I saw people throwing in pieces of wood, large hard plastic crates and pails, a gallon-size decorative tin with lid, a large dog bed, and what looked like an inflatable crib bumper for a very large crib that took up most of the back of a small pickup truck. I heard breaking glass as bags were tossed into a just-emptied compactor. I saw one person lift a very oddly shaped thing with a large green trash bag stretched over it out of her car and carry it horizontally to the compactor. I don’t even want to guess what was in there.
Some people skipped the bag altogether. I saw loose trash dumped out of 30-gallon trash cans as well as small wastebaskets like the kind used in bathrooms. I saw one woman who had only one bag of trash empty it into the compactor and put it back in her car, presumably for next week.
What I learned
What did I learn from this exercise? For one thing, it became obvious to me that it’s very difficult to police the trash compactors. With four compactors in use, I could barely keep an eye on two vehicles at the same time. And the people who were throwing things they shouldn’t have moved very quickly and tended to use the compactor farthest from the attendant. So pay-as-you-throw might be hard to regulate. But it also seemed obvious that pay-as-you-throw would discourage the high-bag-count people from using the Transfer Station. DPW Director Tim Kilhart said he is worried that pay-as-you-throw could encourage illegal dumping. But in cases where one resident brings trash from multiple households, it could discourage that practice, which would help the bottom line of the Transfer Station.
What I learned about my own family’s trash, an above-average four bags per week, was that we are wasting a lot of food. Our bad habits include overbuying, ignoring leftovers in favor of takeout, and not making use of the food in the pantry or freezer until it dies a sad, unfulfilled death. We could certainly do better there. But some amount of food waste is inevitable. A composting station at the Transfer Station would eliminate a lot of food waste from the compactors, and pay-as-you-throw would provide an impetus for that.
Joan Eliyesil covers the DPW and town infrastructure for the Press.
