A Good Year for the Outlaw

A lot has been made about garbage on some of the Peoria blogs recently. I’d link to a recent post from the blogfather’s site, but there seems to be a void in his archives when it comes to anything in the last week.

Anyway, here’s Kewanee’s way of doing things:

The city picks up two 32-gallon wastecans, or two 32-gallon trashbags if you don’t have cans, for free. Anything over that, you attach a neon-lime green “City of Kewanee excess waste” sticker to your additional trash, be it large boxes or extra garbage bags or whatever. The stickers are available at retailers all over town, from convenience stores to grocery stores to evil empire stores, and you can buy them whenever you’d like. The stickers cost .50 cents each.

Further, you can buy heavy-duty paper “lawn waste” bags for the same .50 cent price, and every Monday, the city comes by and picks up any lawn waste you have, from grass clippings to shrub trimmings to pulled weeds.

Basically, if you watch your garbage, if you crush it down well, you can get buy, at least every other week if not every week, without paying anything for garbage. If you go over, you pay a little bit. In early June, I bought $5 worth of green stickers, and here it is July 4th and I still have five left, so I paid $2.50 in trash fees this month. Several months since we’ve lived here (almost a year now, wow) we haven’t paid anything extra for trash.

It works for this town, don’t see why it wouldn’t work in Peoria. You’re making those with a lot of garbage, or those who don’t break down empty boxes or recycle cans or stamp down and crush their garbage, pay more than those who are making an effort. What’s wrong with that?