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Sch’dy can’t afford Olsen’s trash plan

    The city of Schenectady spends more than $2 million a year getting rid of its trash. That’s far more than necessary because the overwhelming majority of its residents still refuse to separate their recyclables — as has been required by state law since 1992.
    Officials want to make it easier for them by adopting something known as single-stream recycling, which has become increasingly popular among private garbage haulers in the suburbs. But Carl Olsen, Schenectady’s commissioner of general services, is balking at a recent directive from the City Council to adopt single-stream immediately. He’s right to, but for the wrong reason.
    Olsen says that in order to do single-stream properly, he’d need to spend $1.5 million to provide residents with oversized plastic containers to fit all their recyclables and to equip city trucks with mechanized lifts to empty them. Without the lifts, he’s said, the sanitation workers would sustain more injuries and miss even more work than they do now — which is a lot. And without jumbo containers, he’s said, residents won’t cooperate. Both assertions are baloney.
    Olsen, who got his start in the private-sector trash collection business, has to realize that he’s working in the public sector now, and that the municipality he works for can ill afford this kind of investment.
    But the city doesn’t really need single-stream recycling; it needs to do a better job enforcing the law. People who insist on mixing their recyclables in with their regular trash should be fined — let them pay the added cost for all the extra tonnage. .....................>>>>.......................>>>>...............http://www.dailygazette.net/De.....r00703&AppName=1

So we recycle water bottles/cans that we pay a 5cent fee of which the state gets then pay a tax to rid ourselves of garbage....

things that make you go hhhhmmmm....

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