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Piling up: A tale of trash in Perkasie and Sellersville
May 19, 2010
By Erin DuBois
Staff Writer
Since the dawn of time, it’s been an embarrassing yet unavoidable problem. Some claim the problem goes back as far as 400 B.C., when Athens established the world’s first municipal dump.
British Victorians enjoyed the convenience of dumping trash out the window, regardless of the heads of unsuspecting passersby, while early New Yorkers fretted not that visitors hailed the city as ‘“a nasal disaster, where some streets smell like bad eggs dissolved in ammonia,’” according to BFI’s trash timeline.
At the turn of the 21st century, refuse disposal is a more civilized but no less contentious prospect. Like a modern day tale of two cities, Sellersville and Perkasie residents wage very different battles where trash is concerned.
Sellersville vs. Perkasie: A Day in the Life of Trash
For Sellersville resident Bruce Hall, disposing of trash is as easy as a walk in the park. Coffee cup in hand, Hall strolls to the curb and drops off his bag, pausing to shoot the breeze with his neighbor. Once the trash truck swoops in, Hall won’t need to give trash another thought until the next collection day.
Travel a few hundred yards across the line into Perkasie, however, and the scene changes dramatically.
It’s Mothers’ Day and Perkasie resident Paul Fort is looking forward to time with his family, a rare occurrence since he works second shift. Coming home from grocery shopping together, the Forts discover that their freezer has died and all the frozen food has thawed. While a Sellersville resident would simply haul the spoiled food to the curb, Fort is victim to the Pay-As-You-Throw system, where residents must dispose of waste in bags purchased from the borough.
Click here to view a comparison of trash programs for Pennridge area towns
“Now we have many different sizes of regular trash bags in the house but keeping a surplus of borough bags on hand can be costly,” Fort said through e-mail correspondence. “So at 7:30 pm on Sunday night I had to go to one of the select stores that carry the special bags so I could clean up this mess. At $3.25 a bag this cleanup cost us $16.25, adding insult to the situation.”
Click here to view Perkasie Borough’s Trash and Recycling Schedule, Rules and Regulations
Fort is not alone in his trash woes.
With two children still in diapers, Kelli Frame and Alan Worman may fill up as many as four trash bags a week. One week, a bag containing soiled diapers was left on the curb in the summer heat because it weighed more than the 40 pounds allowable, Frame said. Frame also bemoaned the tower of boxes toppling in her living room. The boxes, which contained presents from her bridal shower, will remain until the once-per-month cardboard pickup rolls around.
Timeline: A History of the Perkasie Borough’s Trash System
(Hover mouse over dots to reveal dates. Click dots for short description and full story options.)
Worman’s biggest contention with the Pay-As-You-Throw system, however, is not the inconvenience but the lack of choice Perkasie residents have in the matter. PAYT might work well for some, but residents who are burdened by the system should have other options, according to Worman.
Working the “Pay-As-You-Throw” System
If necessity is indeed the mother of invention, some residents have developed creative ways of bucking the system, since borough officials estimate that10 to 15% of residents do not purchase borough bags.
The state of affairs is eerily similar to that observed by the 1893 Boston Sanitary Committee, which stated that “the means resorted to by a large number of citizens to get rid of their garbage and avoid paying for its collection would be very amusing were it not such a menace to public health. Some burn it, while others wrap it up in paper and carry it on their way to work and drop it when unobserved, or throw it into vacant lots or into the river.”
In the case of Perkasie, the menace is not to public health but to neighborly relations.
“Why should I have to pay to subsidize someone else’s trash?” Perkasie resident Andrew Rumbold said.
These are not the words of a die-hard PAYT critic; for while some creatively shirk the system by making work, or even church, their dumping ground, Rumbold has explored innovative ways to make the system work for him.
Rumbold and his wife Dorinda embrace PAYT as part of a larger scheme of environmentally-conscious living. Through adherence to a stringent recycling and composting regimen, the Rumbolds have reduced their trash output to one bag every two to three weeks.
The Rumbolds avoid buying foods in bulky packaging, and they feed leftover produce to their free-range chickens. Their thriving garden is a testament to the richness of their compost pile, which they share with neighbors who do not have ample yard space.
When it comes to trash service, the Rumbolds believe that what goes around comes around. They have been known to provide the trash haulers with cool drinks on hot days, and even offered them a tip one day, which the haulers refused.
The Rumbolds have never found a bag left sitting on their curb after collection day.
The Question of Cost
Whether one endorses a fight or a flight mentality toward the system, most acknowledge inevitable problems. Fort expressed concerns similar to Rumbold’s where cost-efficiency is concerned.
The intent of PAYT programs is to reduce costs by encouraging recycling, but Fort feels that the system is ultimately counterproductive, especially in light of the $35 annual fee which the borough will begin charging this June.
“What happens if residents don’t throw away the 1.7 bags per week the borough study claims is the current bag usage rate,” Fort said in a May 13 e-mail to the borough. “I can tell you what happens. To recoup losses the borough faces due to borough residents following the PAYT philosophy, fees are added countering our very efforts.”
Fort also said that the system punishes larger families, since they produce more trash.
According to Perkasie Borough Assistant Manager Andrea Coaxum, the program is not intended to punish anyone, but to provide a cost incentive for recycling.
Borough bags are priced to cover all expenses associated with trash removal, including employee salaries, transportation, vehicles, landfill fees, leaf and bundled branch collection, and the recycling center.
The new $35 fee is intended to make the system more fair, since even residents who do not buy bags but take advantage of other free services – like curbside bulky waste and recyclable collection – will have to pay.
“The institution of an annual fee will help spread the cost of collecting all material to every household instead of just those residents who are abiding by the rules of the bag program,” Coaxum said in an e-mail response to Fort. “All residents will now be investing in the system.”
The borough’s cost analysis of collection shows that an average household disposes of 1.7 bags per week or nearly 88 bags per year, for an annual cost of $286 for all trash and recycling services, minus the new $35 fee.
Services in other Bucks County communities range from $272 to $436 per year, and most of these programs do not encourage recycling, Coaxum said.
Toward a Greener Sellersville
And so the discussion returns full circle to Hall’s backyard in Sellersville, where despite the ease of his collection day, one thing is noticeably absent – curbside recycling bins.
“My gripe is lack of recycling pick up,” Hall said. “We can haul it to the town recycle dumpsters ourselves, however most residents do not bother. They throw recyclable thrash away with their normal trash. In today’s environmentally-conscious world, that is just wrong.”
Sellersville Borough Manager Alan Frick said that the there is some sentiment, although he is not sure how strong, for instituting curbside recycling pickup after the borough’s current three-year contract ends this year.
“If you bring the service to people they’ll probably use it, and if you make them drive 100 yards it’s a problem,” Frick said.
Sellersville is not mandated to provide curbside recycling, since the population is less than 5000, although the new census figures may drive that number higher. Frick said that the current system at the recycling center is very simple, since all recyclables go into one container, and warned that curbside collection will not necessarily bring in revenue for the borough.
“Do I think personally the cost will be cheaper? No. It’s cheaper to throw everything away, but it’s not popular.”
Councilperson Meg Bardar is exploring options through Blue Mountain / FCR Recycling to bring collection curbside while maintaining the ease of the single-stream system, which requires no sorting of recyclables.
Bardar hopes to invite a Blue Mountain / FCR representative to a future council meeting and to bring council on a tour of their processing facility in order to help them understand the process and benefits of recycling.
“This issue is very dear to my belief that we must begin to care for the environment,” Bardar said.
Recycling Perks in Perkasie
Perkasie residents enjoy an array of curbside services not available in Sellersville, yet some have expressed concern over the lack of recycling for yard waste.
With a population of 8828, according to data from the 2000 census posted on the borough’s website, Perkasie is mandated to recycle yard waste; however, the borough does not have a site large enough to accommodate this.
DEP regulations allow for a small percentage of yard waste in the regular trash stream as long as the borough is recycling aggressively in all other areas, according to Olpere. Perkasie offers fall leaf collection, a service many townships but most boroughs do not, along with chipping bundled branches curbside.
“We recycle more than anyone else around,” Olpere said. “If they’re enforcing regulations, they will have to start with someone else who’s not doing everything Perkasie is doing.”
Perkasie received a recycling performance grant of $20,450 in 2009. The borough has made very preliminary calls to West Rockhill about using a site behind their township building, Perkasie Borough Manager Dan Olpere said. This could be a multi-year project, potentially involving becoming a customer of West Rockhill. Although borough officials could not act fast enough this year, they plan to discuss this possibility further in the next few months, Olpere said.
The borough will also get bids from private collectors this fall. Most of council is not interested in pursuing this avenue, but are willing to explore it as an option, Olpere said. The future of yard waste recycling, however, hinges on the ultimate fate of trash in the borough.
“Why invest in a site to compost if we’re handing it over to a private hauler and getting out of the trash business?” Olpere said.
Perhaps in the end, the moral of the tale comes down to Coaxum’s conclusion: “There are hundreds of different ways for a municipality to structure the collection of trash and recycling. And there are pros and cons to each method, including allowing residents to select their own hauler.”
But for residents and borough officials alike, the question of whether the pros of Pay-As-You-Throw outweigh the cons is still open for debate.
Want to weigh in on the issue? Contact your local borough council member or administrative officials:
Sellersville Borough, 140 E. Church St., Sellersville; 215-257-5075; www.sellersvilleboro.org
Perkasie Borough, 620 W. Chestnut St., Perkasie; 215-257-5065; www.perkasieborough.org
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[...] the Perkasie trash system Jump to Comments The team at Montgomery Media’s News-Herald have started reporting their story about the local trash [...]
“The new $35 fee is intended to make the system more fair, since even residents who do not buy bags but take advantage of other free services – like curbside bulky waste and recyclable collection – will have to pay.
“The institution of an annual fee will help spread the cost of collecting all material to every household instead of just those residents who are abiding by the rules of the bag program,” Coaxum said.
How does this make the system more fair? The people who are currently supporting the system by purchasing bags and using them will also have to pay the $35 rate. So for doing the right thing they get hit with a $35 fee, and those who currently don’t pay into the system, or abuse it, will just pay $35 and continue to not buy borough bags. If it was truly fair, everyone would pay $35 and the bags would be sold cheaper, say $3.00 instead of $3.25. The $35 fee punishes everyone.
I don’t consider using perkasie’s PAYT system being “victim” to it. We put out 1-3 bags per week and have few issues with the system. The borough has been very flexible over the years and while we’ve had bulky items or yard waste left when we didn’t follow the rules, but we’ve never had a trash bag left behind.
Overall, we’re ok with the system
[...] is an ongoing issue in The Perkasie-News Herald’s coverage area. These easy-to-create Flash timelines cover 10 years of stories in way that’s more appealing to the eye. Scroll over the dots to [...]
Kelly- please don’t be so dramatic about the cardboard piling up. For one, you can flatten the boxes and it would take up less than half the room and 2) you said it was from a party, so unless you have those every week I doubt its always that bad. You can always drop it off at the borough recycling center.
[...] meeting where residents requested stories on the local electric rates and the community’s pay-as-you-throw trash collection system. Reporters and editors still did the work but they knew from the time story assignments were [...]
[...] a news meeting where residents requested stories on the local electric rates and the community’s pay-as-you-throw trash collection system. Reporters and editors still did the work but they knew from the time story assignments were [...]