trash fees

 

   Previously, we lived in a city where water, sewer & trash were
bundled together.

   At our new city, they are separate.  According to our neighbor, trash
pickup is $30 a month.

   I was curious - is this high, low, average, or what?

   I was tempted to call around and see if any private companies would
service us.  We have water, telephone, electric, etc., but nobody has
contacted us about setting up trash pickup.  I was wondering if we might
be able to set something up with a larger container and just twice a
month, or something like that.

 



It's about average for a 60gal tip cart.
See if theree are options for larger or smaller carts.
We are paying less for a 30gal tip cart.

 


Ours is a line item on the water bill.  I think it's under $20 a
month, but
I don't really look because I have no choice about it.  Even if I
contracted
privately, the township would still ding me for the service.  For
whatever
it is I pay, I get weekly trash pickup, biweekly recycling pickup,
each
in a cart provided by the trash collector.  They're enormous.  Maybe
95
gallons?  Oh, and weekly yard waste pickup in spring, summer, and
fall.  But I
only use that when I've been hogging out the trash shrubs that have
grown
up under our trees.  I let the grass clippings lie, and mow the leaves
under
the trees to compost themselves.  My township is fairly densely
populated,
but it's by no means a city.  My street is mostly one-acre lots, but
there's
a subdivision at each end of the mile-long block.

Cindy Hamilton

 

It probably depends on the size of the can.  We have a 95 gal can for $36.30
a month.  This can is huge.  Most of the people in the neighborhood get the
35 gal can for $15.44 a month.  We chose the largest because we have been
doing a lot of home improvement projects (including cleaning out the garage)
and so we have been generating a lot of rubbish.  We saved several hundred
dollars by pulling up our old carpet and pad ourselves and cut it into
15"X15" squares with a box cutter and threw it away one can load at a time.
It only took a couple of months to get rid of it.  That was six rooms of
carpet.  I was telling one of the clerks at Lowes about it and he said he
had done his roof that way.  Oh, and that price includes a recycle can of
the same size that is picked up every other week.

 

In article


If it isn't a requirement to have trash
service, you could always offer to share
with your neighbor...that would be
frugal.

In my city trash is contracted out to a
private service (WM) and as far as I can
tell is not mandatory. The good side of
having the service, besides the obvious,
is that you are entitled to three free
street pickups a year of basically
anything that can fit in a 4x8 pile (and
they don't really measure)