My sort-of hometown of Concord, New Hampshire* has created a "pay-as-you-throw" program that forces residents to purchase special trash bags. The bags cost residents $1 for a 15-gallon bag or $2 for a 30-gallon bag.
The question is: How do you get the mandatory trash bags to the consumers? Simple, Concord figured, we'd just have businesses sell them.
One problem:
Market Basket, alone among Concord's major
supermarkets, has decided not to stock the trash bags. Their logic is
simple: Why sell an item for which the store gets no profit?
Why, indeed.
Of course, someone's making a tidy profit. Here are the details:
The way the program works is the city has a contract with a South
Carolina company called Waste Zero. Waste Zero manufactures the bags
and recruits stores to sell them. Waste Zero stores the bags in
warehouses, and the individual stores contact Waste Zero to have bags
shipped to them.
Consumers then pay $1 for a 15-gallon
trash bag and $2 for a 30-gallon bag. The stores get none of that
money. Instead, the stores must send all the money they collect from
the bags to Waste Zero, which takes a cut and gives the rest of the
money to the city. Mark Dancy, president of Waste Zero, said his
company typically keeps 20 to 25 cents for each large bag.
The rest of the money goes into the
city's solid waste fund. Bob McManus, business manager for Concord's
general services department, said the money pays for trash collection,
which costs about $1 million a year through a contract with Bestway
Disposal Services. It is also used to pay tipping fees for trash
disposal at the Wheelabrator waste-to-energy facility in Penacook.
Those fees are increasing from $43.50 per ton in fiscal year 2009,
which ends this month, to $56 a ton in 2010, and to $65 a ton in 2011.
*I'm from here. Close enough.
