Cleveland Smart Bins to Rat Out the Non-Recycler

So then buy your own can? Don't really live in a city where garbage is collected, but that seems the best solution to be sneaky. Are garbage people really going to go through so much trash to see what's inside it and calculate the % which is recyclable?

You Obviously don't live in a city. Most cities have a mandatory trash company that picks up your trash and the cost is included in your taxes.

They'd be sniffing through my garbage all the time. I'm just plain lazy and only pitch my recycling in massive mounds once or twice a month - and fortunately we can add wrapped or bagged piles to our tiny open plastic bin without a penalty.

However, I think this pro-active idea is going to backfire on them. Instead of people recycling properly people will be more likely to put food-tainted cardboard, unwashed milk bottles, and other improperly prepared recycling trash into the bins. Putting such tainted refuse in with the recycling can cause just as many problems.

So get mad at your neighbor and throw a bunch of cans inside his trash in the morning?
This is just a scam by the city with a major flaw like this one.
What a joke.

If they are going to be a bunch of douchenozzles like this then might as well make it easy and have it all sorted post consumer, then Tax the consumer for the service. That way it gets done for sure and people dont have to bother with multiple bins and sorting it out.

Great idea! Tax the living heck out of your citizens, penalize them by double taxing the if they work in a suburb and live in the city, create a poor business climate, and expand another city run, big brother, poorly managed tax waste ( anybody been to the flats lately? ). I am so glad I do not live there anymore. I love to visit my family and friends, but how much crap can this city make clevelanders eat?

Amen Brother!!

I hope those supervisors are well paid...

It's definitely a cute cat, and a nice picture, but I'm not getting the connection to recycling. Still, I like it.

Cleveland just gave Joakim Noah more material,and they sure didn't need to.

There's so much potential for abuse from so every angle on this, and so much potential for mistakes and lawsuits, I'm not at all clear this makes any sense. Maybe they are just planning on threatening and hoping leaving it at that. I think once they go further, they open up a can of worms, and a whole bunch of problems they aren't going to want to deal with.

Unfrickenbeleivable. Now they want to control your garbage. Wow, speechless.

So Cleveland is now making it illegal not to recycle? Next they will make it illegal if people do not ride bikes at least 5 miles a week or if people do not exercise 30 minutes a day, 5 times a week.

The people that I have talked to about the automated trucks hates them. There is a few times where the garbage people knock over cans and then drive off. They do not get out of the truck to pick up the can and empty it.
Of course this could be just their areas.

tldr: I do not like the ideas. Too much to go wrong and too controlling.

Honestly you just charge the crap out of regular garbage. My area charges 3 bucks a bag of regular garbage but recycling is free. We recycle a bunch both because a) you should, you lazy sack and b) it saves us around $40 / month. Just keep ratcheting it up, people can be as lazy as they can afford, but at around $15/bag I imagine even the most stubborn people will take a couple extra minutes a week to deal with it.

Of course people will slough some substandard recycling, but I can't believe the cost for the occasional breach outweighs the benefits. And you have plenty of money for pursuing the cheats.

I don't mind recyclying (which I do) but taking it to this degree (extreme fines) is NAZI environmentalism.Environmentalists are making practically everything people do in their normal lives illegal turning governments into tyrannies.

Last line tells me all I need to know. Want to lower your taxes? Recycle just 55% of all your garbage and the remainder of the pickup is essentially free. Recycle even more and maybe the city can afford to buy some new amenities for a nearby park. This only makes perfect sense.

In the past recycling companies have required customers to presort their recyclables. You had to put aluminum cans in one bin, plastic in another, for example. That's why I don't currently recycle. If the city I live in wants me to recycle they need to do all of the hard work. That's what I pay them for.

I agree, in my town we use automated trucks for pickup, and they just weigh your bin before pickup and you are charged for the actual weight instead of a monthly fee. Our recycling pickup is not free, but is a reasonable $5 a month. The system converted me to a conscientious recycle/compost believer. I went from a half full bin to about half a kitchen sized garbage bag every week.

As someone who worked in a recycling company, I completely support this.
It sounds like it will cause more problems than it will solve. Not to mention that a lot of people will be angered at the city.

Switch cans with ur neighbor when he's not lookin

Is it just me or is anyone else noticing that a lot of cities and counties who are crying poor, have like millions of dollar budget problems, slashing jobs and making all sorts of excuses for cutting this and that; somehow have money for things like RFID embedded recycle bins, red light cameras, and God only knows what else.

"Dad, what started the second American Civil War?"

"Well, son, it all started when city officials in Cleveland wanted to cram RFID tags into the butts of citizens to ensure they were eating their vegetables..."

Or you cold buy this machine and start making your own gas mixture and cut the man out of taxes on your gas a little and stick it to them like they are us...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGG [...] r_embedded

My freind showed me this the other day and I thought it was a really good idea. How much you want to bet we haven't heard about it yet because the man wants to make their money off of it some how and they haven't got that part down or figured out yet.

In Cleveland, it would be recycle 100% of your garbage, and they will raise garbage fees because they make more money skimming off garbage collection than they do recycling.

But, every one is missing the point. You see, even with all the taxes, lousy schools, and general idiocy in Cleveland government, people still live and work there. This is another step towards fixing this, so Cleveland can finally be a paradise for ghosts.

I think a good emp would solve the RFID chip problem. Fried circuits.

At my condo here in South Florida we have 3 recycling cans that line the back side of the dumpster, 2 for bottles and cans and 1 for paper and cardboard. There are 4 dumpsters in my neighborhood, but unless you take your garbage out the day they come pick it up the recycling bins are completely full. Its like there are people with 25 cases of empty beer bottles waiting for the garbage men to leave just to fill it up. We just throw everything in the dumpster. But they would have to dig through the dumpster and comb through our bags to find out who is dumping what. And with all the little bags of dog crap in my garbage that's a Category A Hazmat kind of job.

Yeah, that would make perfect sense if government operated under the same laws of common sense that the rest of us do. But we all know that isn't the case. When have you every known the government to do with less? The government spends and spends and spends, and then acts like it's our civic duty to pay for their spree. When they even discuss tax cuts, it is always framed within the context of how much it will cost the government. That right there tells you all you need to know. They consider all of the money to be theirs... they are just magnanimous enough to let us keep some for ourselves. I am sick to death of this nanny-state bullshit!

dont recycle much do we, you can easily move from a 50 gallon trash container to a 30 gallon trash container just by recycling more, where i live that's almost a $20 reduction in service cost

landfills are rapidly filling up, so we either pay a hell lot more for trash service or open a landfill in your neighborhood. Recycling more seems a reasonable option

I guess I'll just start flushing all my garbage down the toilet.

Let me count the ways to defeat the system
1) Leave them emptied bins out for the snowplows to smash
2) Take an old HDD magnet out and wipe it across anything magnetic/electronic looking
3) Conveniently leave the bins out on a windy day for passing cars to oops! Accidentally hit
4) Put the bins in the trash

i love to hate enviroMENTALists, they send out thousands of big inefficient monster trucks just to run 50+miles every day to pick up reusable trash, some one tell these enviroMENTAList that the big part of the pollution is in the starting and stopping acceleration in a vehicle. Let them see that 150k stops per day looks like in smog. Save the planet kill an enviroMENTAList should be the best recycling policy to date, can't wait for that law to get passed .
i see better solutions to this just in the reader comments. Cleveland is running such a huge scam. You could be fined $100 for not recycling yet it cost $30 per ton $26 of which they make back on the recycling. So at 52 weeks x $100 and you start seeing copper is the only thing worth recycling after you put a bullet in each city council member’s head.
NY, Maine, Mich., Conn., Iowa all have much better programs in place, but that's not to say it can't be improved upon, the deposit system that is placed on aluminum cans and plastic 2 liters. Why not A) increase the garbage fees with a tax that goes to pay for battery disposal only B) create and increase the deposit and expand it to all materials you want recycled C) make it law for retailers to have the recycling dumpster at all the businesses (grocers, auto parts, electronics stores etc.) since they are selling the junk that needs to be recycled. D) A conveyor belt for the dump trucks to unload on and get the trash sorted (i.e. the magnet crane at auto junk yards, things like that for most metals) E) we have people sitting on their duff's in prison, what better way to curb them and other from going to jail then to have them sort out the trash, sure some of them will find a loaded gun/knives/sharp objects, and try to kill each other/prison guards and use the various materials they found to try and escape. There are ways and security measures to curb that behavior also.

So many better ways, govt.' can't run businesses because they fail tremendously every time they try due to their greed and inefficiency.

Why not give us a cut of the recycling profit per pound? You wouldn't believe what some people would do just to save a few cents.

Recycling is forced upon us by greenies who are stupid and don't realize that recycling creates more waste than just tossing it in the trash.

Read #3

http://www.cracked.com/article_170 [...] -work.html

good luck with that, i take my trash out (homeowner) about every month and recycling even less.