cardboard cart pilot program
I have my new cart for a week now. There will be a total of 300 carts deployed. (I have written to all the council members asking if they got one) The cart will be picked up on your usual trash/recycling day. There will be a totally different truck that picks up those carts. It's called a packer... just like the old garbage trucks that we used for decades with one man driving and one man picking up and throwing. The idea now is that the special, very clean dedicated packer truck will have one driver only. He will have to stop the truck in the road, move the cart to the back of the truck, connect it to the lift and dump the material, bring the cart back to the sidewalk. Seems simple enough... but this truck, M-Friday will be stopping at every cardboard cart that's on the sidewalk, adding to the slow down of traffic.
A few facts, recycled cardboard was fetching 75 dollars a ton last week. Each of the 300 volunteers who got the carts would have to have 6 lbs of cardboard each week to make just 1 ton. I'm sure it costs more than 75 dollars a day to run the routes, considering labor and fuel costs.
In the cart itself you get a flyer called "Recycling Do's and Don't s" saying all the things that can't go, but they left off milk and juice and soup cartons. Every one of those containers have the universal recycle insignia. Will normal people just realize those cartons don't go into the cardboard recycle cart?
It seems to me that this cardboard only pilot program has not been fully thought out. This is just postponing the ultimate remedy for contaminated cardboard, a massive educational program from the DPW, the Mayor, Council and Schools.
posted by Jim Pillsbury @ 1:07 PM
7 Comments
7 Comments:
How much is this going to cost us? Will they be keeping track of how much cardboard they pick up each week to see if this is worth it? Only 300 carts means only 60 to pick up each day. IF the driver has the addresses and can make routes that are logical and economical, 60 stops a day does not seem like a lot. Does anyone know how many pick-up the regular trash and the recycle guys do every day?
that's a very good question.. I'll ask how many stops per work day do they have now. The total number of households they stop at I believe is around 14K.
The point is.. not every household will produce enough cardboard to be picked up on a weekly basis. But how will the driver of the compactor know how many cardboard barrels are out at the curb. Won't he or she have to drive the entire route and look for the cardboard only bins? I don't see how they can do it differently. Some one tell me how it will work.
He does not have to drive the entire route. He just has to drive to 300 different addresses over the course of 5 days. He knows who has the new containers, at least he should know, and he just needs to go to those 300 locations and I doubt these trial bins went only to people on one particular route. Should not take all that long at all. But what do I know.
Couple of questions for you Mr. Pillsbury, knower of all things Framingham related. How many regular trash trucks are on the round each day, and how many recycle trucks are on the road each day? If it is just one each day, and they are picking up at 14,000 stops, then they are doing 2800 stops a day. That seems awfully high, so I suspect there is more than one truck out each day, but I also doubt there are lots or trucks out there each day. Sounds like the person driving the cardboard truck is going to have lots of free time on his hands. What else does he do?
there are only two of the side arm trash and recycle trucks in the fleet as far as I know.Town Meeting approved the purchase of those trucks to save time, worker injuries and manpower, only one person needed. Remember the issue of cardboard being rejected is the contamination. The packer truck will have to be squeaky clean and stay that way to pick up cardboard. I can't imagine how many of those packers we have left since we bought the side arm trucks. I thought I saw the DPW asking for a new packer truck as a back up for 800,000.00 or so.
Two trucks would mean 1400 pickups a day so doing 300 in a week for this cardboard program is only a part time job. What else is this city employee going to do to fill the rest of his 40 hour week?
How long is this trial program going to run and can they change this 2 a pick-up every other week or even once a month. Unlikely any of us are going to have enough corrugated cardboard (the only kind they will take) to fill one of these bins every single week. Where is the money for this coming from since I read a few months ago that the trash and recycle department were over $160,000 in the hole. Before I support something like this I need to know what it is going to cost and how it is going to be paid for.
This is going to be expensive. What other cities/towns offer this service? We seem to be shooting to be a Westwood or Hopkinton. We are not Westwood or Hopkinton we are Framingham and we need to start acting like the community we are not the one we pretend to be
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