Most Ann Arbor residents will likely find a way to handle the extra cart, I don’t doubt. I can only speak for the situation in our 80 unit townhouse-style condominium community, where each unit has a small single car garage, and carts must be kept indoors according to the association rules. Even the smallest (32 gallon) trash cart takes up valuable space in the garage. The option to use the same cart for either trash or recycling would be very attractive for households in our situation, since we normally don’t generate enough trash or recycling to put them both out on the same week. After all, the goal should not be a “a large recycling bin and a small trash cart”, but small carts for both trash AND recycling.

Most reporting does not do a good job of explaining that government money is in “buckets”. Some buckets have money in them when others do not. Roads and bridges are paid for in large part by money that comes from the state gasoline tax and that is down across Michigan. Witness the Washtenaw county road commissions problems. In Oakland county they are cutting snow removal money in half for next winter.

Big bridge projects are funded by the state or federal governments. The Broadway Bridges or the Huron Parkway Bridge is a good example in A2.

The General Fund “bucket” of almost all governments in Michigan is low and can’t keep up with paying for police and fire. But other buckets are doing OK.

In Ann Arbor recycling is paid for from the Solid Waste Millage. This money cannot by law be spent on things except as they relate to the solid waste budget.

Over the long haul I think recycling pays for itself in Ann Arbor and when the land fill tipping fees finally go up the city will make out well.

Our full size trash cart takes up no more room than our trash cans did before and we don’t take it out every week so we could have a small one. The new recycling carts will take up no more floor space than two bins do now.

We should all be moving toward a large recycling bin and a small trash cart.

The trash carts are a huge improvement over the old cans and bags. The animals can’t get at it now and trash day is so much neater in the neighborhood. I look forward to having a new recycling cart.

1)Use the same cart for trash and recycling. This would allow the same trucks to be used for both, but would require trash/recycling pick up on different days of the week. Sounds like a hassle, I know, but if combined with a food scrap composting program (now under consideration), and given the size of the carts, many residents would not need to put out their trash/recycling every week.
or
2) Keep same-day trash/recycling, and offer residents the choice of getting an new recycling cart, or using their existing trash cart for recycling. The carts would need a changeable sign so that residents could show whether trash or recycling was inside. Either 1 or 2 would save some of the $1.25 million budgeted for carts now.
and
3)Make sure that the Recyclebank system weighs carts at the truck, instead of averaged over the entire route. If we equip trucks with the recycle bank weighing equipment, and use common trash/recycling trucks, we could even adopt a “pay-as-you-throw” system for trash more easily sometime in the future.

I argued that recyclebank could be adopted in the current two-stream system by fitting RFID tags to the existing bins. Councilmember Hohnke reffered to this idea, but it was dismissed by Mr. Frey (because it has not been done before.) Perhaps this is understandable, given that the idea was not raised until the 11th hour, and was possibly not put forward by anyone else before this council meeting. My idea for alternating-week pickup of paper or containers would only have been required if automated cart pickup was used with a two-stream system.

I also said that I thought the expansion to additional plastic types could be accomplished just as easily in a two-stream system. The new automated equipment is not capable of separating #3thru#7 plastics. Both single-stream and two-stream systems use manual sorting here. Some additional capital investment in two-stream may have been required to handle the additional volume, but this should have been considered as an alternative to replacing the whole system with single-stream. A comparison between a modified two-stream system, or a single-stream system could have then been made considering the cost, landfill diversion, and quantity and quality of recycled materials.