I, for one, do everything in my power to reduce, re-use, and recycle. Besides recycling everything that the center takes, I compost, buy in bulk, take bags to the store with me, return plastic to City Market, and save my boxes, magazines, toilet paper and paper towel rolls, etc. to drop off at the Post Office on a monthly basis. I sort through articles of clothing and other sundry items and take useable and useful stuff to WabiSabi.
The point of this is that I rarely have more than one bag of trash. Yet I pay not only the same garage pick-up fee that someone with lots of garbage pays, I pay $10 a month more to reduce my gas emissions and support the local business that picks up our recycling. So why am I paying more when I am expending all of this extra effort to reduce the amount of garbage I create?
The people in this community who take the effort to create less trash, thus saving money for the garbage collection and the Solid Waste District by reducing the amount of trash that goes to the landfill, should be rewarded, not penalized. If there were some (any?) incentives for reducing peoples’ garbage, and recycling more, perhaps there would be more participation in this community. Right now it seems backward.
Perhaps the Solid Waste District board needs to do things differently and create a new paradigm. One where the emphasis truly is on “reduce, re-use, recycle and respect.”
—Judy Powers
Moab