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Location: East of Seattle since 1992, 615' Elevation, Zone 8b - originally from SF Bay Area
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TabulaRasa
My parents mostly compost and burn at their rural spread, as well as make runs to the recycling center.
Same with my parents. They always have a burn pile on their 4 acre property, a big compost heap, recycling bins, and the local transfer station is just a mile down the road. They will save up the trash, bagged and in closed metal cans until they have a pickup load, then it's about $7, with recycling free.
Probably costs them about $42/year. In my more suburban area, it's $24.51/month for curbside, plus another $9.26 if you need a yard waste container. I have a chipper/shredder so don't use that.
We take trash and recyclables to the county dump about 2-3 times a month, no charge. For yard waste, we let it compost naturally in the wooded areas around the back/side of our property.
Our neighbor burns his trash once in a while, ugh, it smells! I know some of the others on our side of the street pay for private pick up.
The rest of our neighborhood is in city limits and have trash pick up included in their city taxes. We're happy to be outside the city limits.
I probably could burn my garbage here but they have a free "convenience center" (AKa dump) in town near the post office. It is easier to take the trash in and dispose of it there. If I had to pay for it I would burn. I think the reason it is free here is that when it wasn't too many people would dump it on the side of the road.
63/quarter for the typical huge bucket on wheels. We also have the option to have a small dumpster on site, which is popular with the folks that have horse properties around here. No clue what they're dumping in there, but my buddy with a handful of horses has said that he has overflowed his dumpster occasionally. No recycling service that I'm aware of. As a single guy living alone, the twice weekly bucket pickup is far more service than I need. I often can go several weeks without filling up the can.
I do burn a lot of paper goods here, largely things with my name or personal information on them. Run them through the strip shredder first, then into the burn barrel.
I've thought about composting occasionally, but living in the low desert without any kind of garden, it just seems like unnecessary extra steps for something that's going to end up in the trash eventually anyways. If I lived in an area that wasn't bone dry, and had some wooded area on the property it would likely be a different story for me.
We have lived in our town since the end of April of last year but we just moved to this house this month. In our old neighborhood, we were in what was considered the county. Therefore, there was no regular trash pickup for everyone. You either paid to have the trash removed or you had to take it to the dump. My hubby didn't think paying was necessary since we lived close to the dump anyway. So he'd just take it there. Seemed like many of the other neighbors didn't want to pay OR take their trash to the dump; so they just burned their trash.
$42/quarter for weekly pick up of garbage and recycling. It's a pain having to wheel those huge barrels down our driveway, but still much easier than having to take it all to a dump. We have our choice of haulers, the first one we had was almost triple the cost of our current one. Some people opt for back door pickup, and are willing to pay for it.
If it wasn't mandatory I could throw my little bag of trash in the under-utilized dumpster at work and take my recyclables to the recycle center on the edge of town, but of course the government can't trust me to do that.
This is what I do. Every morning I take plastic bag with refuse to either work or gym trash can. We have chicken farm, so no food wasted. We have very little recyclables as we do not drink sodas and such. We reuse gallons and half gallons for all kinds of property use and if I need to, I have sharp knife and I slice it into pieces and do as said before.
Allied Waste here is very expensive, a monopoly, and ridiculously unreliable. I had them for several years, then said to the hell with it. Do fine without service for about 8-9 years by now. I saved quite a few thousand dollars this way.
Paper, wood, etc we burn.
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