Is garbage hauling sustainable?

Caveat: this is not a Recology problem even though they are the only named entity.

There are more than twice as many garbage trucks, 179,000, in the US as there are transit buses. These refuse hauling monsters get an average of 2.8 miles per gallon. Garbage trucks move at an average speed of 10mph, an incredibly inefficient pace for a combustion engine, but one that's necessary because of the garbage trucks duties. The average garbage truck guzzles 8600 gallons of diesel fuel a year. Together US garbage trucks use 1.5 billion gallons of fuel, about 4% of all the diesel used in the US, accounting for billions of dollars sent overseas. (from $20 per gallon by Christopher Steiner page 162.)

Now these trucks will also get to go load a train, with garbage from from the Peninsula to Marin, because we don't price out what we throw away. Senator Reid can fix this with a federal tipping rate fee of $100/ton. For the role of tipping fees see Understanding Dynamics of Landfill Gate Rates by Cary Pecket, page 32f. BioCycle, August 2009. Higher tipping fees enable business from recycling including home deconstruction. The money should go to Fish and Wildlife for enforcement of the Clean Water Act since a secondary problem of any dump is toxins leached into the water table.

The primary problem is garbage service as a mechanism to expand sprawl in existing polluted corridors; and roads into openspace, including the road to nowhere, which ends up creating a community by the dump (Steiner's point in the opening quote.)

Recology trucks in the Belmont area are biodiesel. But as Stanford Professor Jacobson showed, when their fossil fuel production component is factored in, biofuels are worse in most metrics.
Since Belmont just signed up with Recology (formerly Norcal) this article could be titled: Belmont boards for burial at Burning Man.

Michael Cabanatuan, Chronicle Staff Writer

In the dusty Nevada desert, about 30 miles east of the playa where Bay Area artists and hipsters gather annually to build a temporary city at the Burning Man festival, a San Francisco garbage company wants to build a dump for Bay Area trash.

But a group of residents in the Winnemucca area, near where Recology seeks to build the 1-square-mile landfill, wants the company to leave the desert alone - and California to keep its garbage to itself.

"The notion that Nevada is some sort of wasteland because we don't have Ponderosa pines covering it is repugnant," said Jim French, retired wildlife biologist from the Nevada Department of Wildlife and a member of Nevadans Against Garbage, a group opposing the planned dump.

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Compact development versus high flow users

We know compact development is sustainable versus the resource intensive development we have today that has resulted in peak everything. When we look at high flow users what models can we demonstrate. Garbage and water and good places to start.

There are four houses on my east west running considerably sloped street-block. On the south side are me and an elderly neighbor. Four in our household one in hers. We both put out twenty gallon garbage cans that are mostly empty. Today was only garbage day. Next week on an alternating schedule is recycling day.

Across the street on the north side there are two houses also. The westerly house has six, four small children and the parents, and use the 32 gallon trash can. The easterly house has two residents both retired and use a 20 gallon trash can.

The trash company sends out a huge biodiesel powered garbage truck. The truck has powered arms shaped like a fork which can pick up and empty a 32 gallon can. The two operators know the street and pick up the trash from the upslope or westerly side. They split the job. One guy has a 64 gallon can on wheels which he walks down the hill. He picks up the two 20 gallons and toss them into his 64 then crosses the street and gets the 20 gallon of the retires. His 64 gallon can is still not full so he continues onto the next block.

The other operator runs the truck and picks up the 32 gallon trash can across the streets. After he unloads the can he gets back in the truck and drives off after his partner. I assume they empty the walking can out after five or six houses.

I suppose in our lower rates for 20 gallon or ten gallon cans its possible to see a benefit from the efficiencies that a walking infrastructure offers the garbage company. However we don't live in a compact development for obvious reasons- one in four residents requires a big massive truck. That truck requires a big massive road which requires resurfacing every ten years and a big massive public works department. And as you add up the associated needs in water and sewer and power and food and its eventual demise in the garbage truck and sewer its possible to see that the infrastructure needs for the few large "wealthy" high flow users determine the public cost amortized over everyone. Charging for garbage by weight and sewer by volume and adjusting the costs for the increased infrastructure can reduce consumption.

Requirements for compact developments and great neighborhoods could put surcharges to ensure compliance with a compact infrastructure designed on sustainable costs.

Next week I'll take a video and show it at the city council.