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Editor,
Menlo Park residents have, or will soon receive, a large postcard from the city of Menlo Park explaining its desire to increase the cost of services for trash, recycling, and compost pickups for residents and commercial enterprises. A proposed schedule of rates for the next five years is included, as is a description of how to protest the proposed rates if one wishes to do so. (Oddly, protests must be written and submitted in person to the city. I guess they don’t like email or text messages.)
I understand that rates increase over time, as costs of equipment rise, fair wages for employees living in an expensive metro area increase and space for waste disposal becomes more difficult to find. I also understand that increasing rates might, in some cases, cause people to rethink their consumption habits.
What I find to be lacking is any explanation about what the city is doing to decrease waste. The rate increases are most likely based on forecasts of historic data related to waste container volumes. For residents, those are the bins we place outside our homes once a week, with no distinction between full bins or almost empty bins, waste that is properly sorted into the correct containers, or the effort required at the waste facilities to process the contents of the bins.
Further, the city makes no mention of how it, along with other government bodies, can work with industry to reduce packaging, increase the life span of durable products, incentivize the reuse of usable goods and generally decrease the inputs into the waste system. Since the 1970s a mantra of the green movement has been to “reduce, reuse, and recycle.” The order of these three things is important, but often lost. Recycling has become the default, rather than reduction or reuse. Most environmental studies show that recycling is not going well in the U.S., and fortunately foreign partners have woken up and are refusing to play the dirty recycling game where we Americans shipped our waste to them for processing, not by automated, safe systems, but by humans, often children, who work without adequate safety protections or means of dealing with with toxic materials.
A more informed mail piece from the city would have acknowledged the problem of solid waste as something to be tackled further upstream, where products are made and how people use them, and eventually, dispose of them. And to be fair, perhaps they are thinking about that. But there’s nothing in the communication referenced above to suggest anything other than business as usual, which is an opportunity lost.
Steve Taffee
Menlo Park
