Tag Archives: trash

Too much trash

Karen is taking a break. This column appeared in December, 2014. Read it for nostalgia because times have changed. Now several downtown neighborhoods enjoy two pick-up days for recycling, which has boosted the recycling rate. Those residents who recycle religiously produce little trash, so the trash pickup days went from three to two in those neighborhoods. It means that trash sits on the sidewalk for less time and the streets are much cleaner. But Boston still faces challenges about keeping clean.

 Bostonians complained about it in the 1920s. We still complain about it. It’s so common and yet so difficult to solve. Maybe new Mayor Marty Walsh’s team can put the matter to rest.

         We’re talking trash.

         Boston is dirty compared to other American and European cities. “We moved into the city nine years ago,” said one resident, “but we have been in Massachusetts for 36 years, and I cannot remember a time when we didn’t think Boston was dirty.”

         They only place I’ve been that had more trash strewn about than my home town was Kolkata (Calcutta).

         One way to address the problem would be to ask why Boston continues to be dirty, and attack the reasons. I asked some downtown Bostonians—Joan, Jane, Colin and Diane—why they thought we have problems other cities don’t.

         Bostonians lack pride in their surroundings, they said. Absentee landlords feel little stake in the community so they eke all the money they can out of their property and don’t convey rules to tenants or clean the sidewalk in front. Students and short-term renters don’t put trash out properly or at the right times. Shopkeepers don’t sweep in front of their businesses. “In European cities shop owners are out every morning cleaning the area in front of their property,” said Jane.

         Trash sits too long on the street. Charlestown has pickup only one day a week, but trash is collected in other downtown neighborhoods two or three times a week. On Beacon Hill and in the North End trash can be put out at 5 p.m. and won’t get picked up until after 7 a.m. the next morning. That’s at least 14 hours three times a week that trash bags can be rifled by pickers, torn by rats, and backed over by cars too close to the curb.

         Except for the Back Bay and the South End, which have alleys that hold big bins, most of the rest of downtown uses plastic bags. Irresponsible residents don’t use heavy enough bags, so they are easily broken into by vermin or trash pickers, or they blow around.

         A dearth of trash bins compounds the problem.  Boston is a walking city. Tourists are all over our neighborhoods looking at the sights, but unless they are on a commercial street, they won’t find a bin in which to throw their trash.

         This problem occurs in front of some buildings with sidewalk smokers who throw butts on the ground.

         Irresponsible dog owners are to blame too. Even if they pick up after their dogs, too many leave the bags in a tree pit for someone else to deal with. Trash bins in the residential neighborhoods would address this problem too.

         Surveys about how to solve those problems have been inconclusive. North End residents rejected replacing a trash pickup with a recycling day. On Beacon Hill, two-thirds of the residents felt it would make the neighborhood cleaner, but the Beacon Hill Civic Association board was split 50-50, said civic association president Keeta Gilmore.

         Solutions on which neighborhoods agree: Add another day of recycling pickup no matter what. And bins along residential streets would help.

         But a real solution in some neighborhoods would be to reduce the hours residents could set trash out in Bay Village, the North End and Beacon Hill to mornings only, between 6 and 9 a.m., when the trash trucks would start their rounds. This would keep trash off the sidewalk at night when the rats are out and would reduce the time trash sits outside to usually less than six hours a day. It would make setting out trash convenient for residents walking to work.

         The city renegotiates its contracts with trash haulers in 2014, and a new mayor and his staff could satisfy many residents with such a plan.

         Meanwhile, Colin, who has moved back to Boston after many years in other cities, has an outlook that might hearten downtown residents. As bad as the trash problem in Boston is now, he said, Boston is much cleaner than when he lived here before.

Recycle City

We can get pretty depressed at the precarious state of the environment and the steps public officials are not taking to remedy the problem. Even more depressing are the climate change deniers, the clean coal boosters, the natural gas pipeline aficionados and the people who lack concern about fossil fuels damaging our air and water. Not even several toxic spills into rivers and the oceans have been able to move Congress to face facts and the future.

So it is nice to know that Boston has a tiny bit of good news on the environmental front. The city has increased its recycle rate. It is transforming the sticks in your garden into compost. The city is a wee bit cleaner.

Hey. Let’s take what we can get.

Downtown Boston’s recycling rate has increased by almost 12 percent since last July, Boston Public Works Commissioner Michael Dennehy reported. Several factors went into this good news. The city has placed recycle receptacles beside most trash bins along such major streets as Boylston, Beacon, Newbury and Cambridge, so that items formerly thrown in the trash are now being recycled.

In all the downtown neighborhoods except Charlestown, the city now collects trash only two days a week. But it has increased its collection of recyclables to two days a week also, up from one day a year ago. Some residents, whose neighborhoods formerly experienced trash pickup three days a week, complained bitterly that neighbors living in small apartments couldn’t store their trash for the extra days between pickups, and the streets would be even trashier than before.

But that hasn’t happened. Reducing the number of hours trash sits on the sidewalk each week has made the neighborhoods cleaner. “I was pleasantly surprised,” said Paula Della Russo of the North End. “There is less litter in the streets, and I haven’t seen as many rodents.”

More recycling has also saved the city money. It costs $74 a ton to get rid of trash, but only $5 a ton to deposit the recyclables at the Casella recycling plant in Charlestown, said Dennehy. So every ton of recyclable material the trucks pick up saves the city’s taxpayers $69.

When the market for plastics was better, the city was actually paid for such material.

The material that does not go into the trash contributes to the city’s diversion rate. That amount has been growing too. In April of this year in the whole city it was up 27 percent over April, 2014. The material diverted is not only recyclables. It also includes yard waste, which the city this year picks up every two weeks in the spring, once a month in the summer, and every week from the last week in October through the first week in December. Dennehy said if people put out their yard waste on the wrong day the trash haulers will not put it in the trash, but instead will leave it on the sidewalk until the yard waste truck comes on the right day for pickup.

Yard waste goes to City Soil, which for about two years has composted, screened and sifted the organic material (including Christmas trees) at its site along the American Legion Highway and delivered the compost to Boston’s community gardens. Residents can pick up compost there for their own gardens in City Soil’s retail shop.

We still have trash, however. The downtown trash goes to the Wheelabrator waste-to-energy power plant in Saugus. It can burn 1,500 tons per day and delivers electricity to 30,000 households. Trash from the outer neighborhoods—Hyde Park, JP, West Roxbury, for example—gets trucked to the SEMASS facility in Rochester, Massachusetts just south of I-495 near Route 28. SEMASS burns the trash at a rate of 3,000 tons per day, also producing energy. This facility charges the city $60 per ton of trash.

This year the city added a fifth hazardous waste drop-off day.

There are still problems that need to be solved. Although converting waste to energy sounds like a good idea, the plants have their own problems, so much so that the state has imposed a moratorium on building new ones, said George Bachrach, president of the Environmental League of Massachusetts. He said the only effective way to deal with trash is to drastically reduce it, and increase recycling. Some cities and towns have tried such financial incentives as charging for trash or allowing residents a limited amount of trash after which they would be charged. Boston has not gone that route yet.

In January and February, the recycle rate was considerably down. Apparently deep snow affects residents’ tendency to recycle. The outlying neighborhoods’ recycling rate is not as good as the downtown’s, and that’s another place for improvement. Although in April 2015 more than one ton of disposables out of five was being recycled or repurposed, Dennehy would like to see it improve to one out of four or 25 percent.

So it is little by little. That’s better than nothing.

Mayor Walsh: We’re okay with bold

This is an advice column. To Marty Walsh. With pictures. The message: You’ve been bold. Expand your efforts.

The mayor’s State of the City speech showed his intention to solve two of the Boston’s thorniest problems—housing and education. Downtown residents need affordable housing and good public education as much as other neighborhoods. But neighborhoods in Boston’s densest areas have additional problems. The persistent lack of solutions affects downtown residents’ everyday life.

Since Marty seems to be taking bold action on two important fronts, we’d like to remind him of the innovative steps other city leaders have taken to improve quality of life for center city residents. Such steps require daring and fortitude, and we think he just might have those qualities.

 

Here is a solution from London:

 

Picture 1

 

This photo shows how seriously London residents take cleanliness. If a dog fouls a sidewalk or street in Kensington or Chelsea, the owner could be fined 2,500 pounds sterling, or about 3,700 U.S. dollars. (There was another sign that said the top fine was 1,000 pounds, but I liked this one better.)

The City of Boston website says there is a law that one must clean up after one’s dog, but no fine is mentioned. With no consequence, the dog owners with low IQs—that must be the reason they don’t pick up because it is so easy to do so—show no inclination to follow the rules.

A large fine, publicized on signs throughout the neighborhoods, then levied by alert city officials, would be a deterrent.

 

Picture 2

 

This sign accompanied a sofa that was left on a South Kensington street. In Boston we are lucky—the trash guys pick up stuff like that. But televisions and toilets, which they don’t pick up, can sit on the sidewalks for days. No fine apparently goes with this sign, probably because it is impossible to tell who put the offending item out in public view. Nevertheless, calling it an environmental crime raises the stakes.

 

No pictures exist for the rest of these ideas taken from other cities. But Mayor Walsh could copy the boldest ones and endure the complaints that will surely come. Then, within a year, everyone would accept them because their lives would be better.

 

Charge big bucks for resident parking stickers. Bostonians, like other Americans, are guaranteed life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but that does not include free parking. Parking stickers should cost a significant amount per year—50 to 75 dollars for the first car and double and triple that amount for a second and third car per household. Even though half the people in some downtown neighborhoods have no car, parking is still difficult. Charging for stickers would remove a few cars, and it would raise funds for other needed services.

 

Charge big bucks to drive into Boston. Forbes Magazine reports that Boston is the ninth most traffic-congested city in America. Cities in other parts of the world have successfully attacked this problem. Singapore, Oslo, and Stockholm have designated congestion zones and imposed fees to enter them. London, another example, charges the equivalent of about 17 dollars for the authorization to drive into the zone between seven a.m. and six p.m. on weekdays. The charge reduces traffic, but it also reduces toxic traffic emissions, a goal Mayor Walsh has said he wants to achieve. Funds raised supplement London’s transport system. Wouldn’t it be nice to have such a new source of revenue for our MBTA?

Wouldn’t it also be nice for those people who must drive into Boston to have fewer vehicles on the road so they don’t have to waste an estimated 35 hours annually sitting in traffic?

Congestion charges were at first unpopular with Londoners. Then they decided they loved it. Judging by London’s continued success as a financial center, the congestion charge did nothing to stunt its economic growth, and may have stimulated it instead.

Mayor Bloomberg tried to initiate such a thing in New York, but that city’s residents were not worldly enough to take such a step.

Many Bostonians worry defensively that Boston isn’t world class. Taking any of these steps would put Boston front and center into the category of cities taking important steps toward making themselves better places to live.

 

 

Too much trash

Bostonians complained about it in the 1920s. We still complain about it. It’s so common and yet so difficult to solve. Maybe new Mayor Marty Walsh’s team can put the matter to rest.

We’re talking trash.

Boston is dirty compared to other American and European cities. “We moved into the city nine years ago,” said one resident, “but we have been in Massachusetts for 36 years, and I cannot remember a time when we didn’t think Boston was dirty.”

They only place I’ve been that had more trash strewn about than my home town was Kolkata (Calcutta). Continue reading →