Agenda - 11-19-2013-13 (4) - Laserfiche WebLink

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INFORMATION ITEM Memorandum To: Michael Talbert, Interim County Manager From: Gayle Wilson, Solid Waste Management Director Subject: Pay As You Throw Date: November 4, 2013 At the Board of Commissioners' (BOCC) request, staff has been asked to provide information about Pay- As-You-Throw(PAYT) generally and with regard to previous staff/Manager meetings with a company called Waste Zero Background Over the past thirteen years Orange County and the three Towns have all discussed implementing PAYT in one form or another as primarily a means of economically incentivizing reduction of solid waste disposal in the residential single family sector. PAYT can also be considered from the perspective of providing funding or supplementing funding for the waste services. In 2008 the Solid Waste Plan Work Group evaluated and considered the option of incorporating PAYT at solid waste convenience centers to use as both a financing mechanism and a tool to incentivize waste reduction.The Solid Waste Advisory Board (SWAB) also provided the elected boards with input following its many discussions on the subject. Carrboro and Chapel Hill have also discussed this matter on more than one occasion. As the County and the Towns have successfully and continuously reduced their waste disposal volumes without use of this tool, none has yet adopted PAYT although it has been thoroughly considered and discussed collectively and individually. PAYT, a utility based fee-for-waste concept or'trash metering' as one company refers to it, is in general a strategy whereby individual households or businesses pay for their solid waste collection/disposal by the unit disposed, be that by the bag,the pound, a varying container size or frequency of collection of the waste container. The strategy can be extended to include bulky items, yard waste and other forms of waste using tags, bags or stickers (usually but not necessarily prepaid)to represent certain pre- determined amounts. It has been generally proven successful to varying degrees in incentivizing households to reduce the amount of residential waste disposed. PAYT differs from the conventional residential waste collection financing approach used broadly in the United States and in North Carolina, including municipalities in Orange County, of charging residents a flat fee either annually or monthly for waste disposal (typically funded from the general fund), irrespective of how much waste they generate. PAYT thus, it is argued, provides an immediate economic signal and incentive to save money by reducing the amount of trash. Many communities across the country that have adopted PAYT have chosen some variation on a volume-based strategy either based on number and size of bags or tags used or the size and/or frequency of collection of the garbage cart. 1