Until a few years ago, the town of Plympton, Massachusetts, was quite literally throwing away money. People were producing so much trash that it was threatening to put the municipal transfer station out of business.
Under the town’s system, residents would buy a $240 sticker for their cars that allowed them yearlong access to the dump, where they could dispose of as much garbage as they wished. But the sheer volume, combined with climbing landfill fees, meant that this service was costing the local government nearly twice what it was taking in.
One solution was to double the price of dump stickers, but that would hit Plympton’s low-income population particularly hard and wouldn’t have been fair to smaller households — like seniors — that produced minimal trash. So, the town of roughly 3,000 decided to try something that it had seen other municipalities do: charge per bag.
“It virtually cut waste in half,” Rob Firlotte, Plympton’s highway superintendent, said of the results. In 2022, before the new system, the ... Read more
