Dumping fees in Vancouver going up

Recently the city management teams of Vancouver and Burnaby decided to increase the dumping fees for their residents. On paper these changes should encourage people to throw away less garbage, but is this the reality. We won’t know until we give this trend some time. For example Burnaby noticed that regardless of increasing the junk removal fees, for the last 4 years residents have been generating more garbage than ever. People are creatures of habit and habits do not change so easy. We have to look at the bigger picture. People in Vancouver – like any other big city in the west – buy things that they want instead of buying things that they need. This consumerism is the source of all the issues we have with too much junk.

The higher disposal fees will do very little to change people’s way of dealing with their garbage. They will continue generating more rubbish and just pay the extra fees. Imposing too high of disposal fees and then the illegal dumping will begin. If you don’t believe me, go to any downtown Vancouver back street and count how many mattresses you will see there. This happened after the city of Vancouver introduced a minimum recycling fee of $20 for each mattress or boxspring. In general, most people throw away a mattress and a box spring. This is an extra cost of $40, not counting the rental for a pickup truck or a van. Most people do not have the transportation for large items like a mattress. In most cases they are even forced to call a Junk Removal company and the extra recycling fees are pushing those services even higher. Prior to introducing the mattress recycling fee, rubbish removal companies operating in Vancouver were willing to pick them up for a much smaller disposal fee. It also takes longer to get rid of them. A full load of rubbish that has some mattresses has to be taken twice to the dump. The first time the garbage has to be emptied and then the truck has to come out and be weighted. Then it has to go in again to drop the mattresses. All this could be done by just one visit but the junk removal company loses money because it will be charged the mattress recycling fee and the weight of the mattress. All these extra expenses end up being paid by the clients. Hence, the higher fees these rubbish disposal companies charge.

I guess the point is that if Vancouver city keeps on inflating the disposal fees, at some point they will see only a drop of the legal garbage. The illegal disposal of garbage will explode and no one in Vancouver wants this to happen. This is actually a very simple economics 101 rule. In my opinion disposal fees increasing will do very little for the legal garbage disposal. What will work is changing people’s shopping habits. However, I am against changing those habits by making things cost more. Maybe Vancouver has learned some part of that lesson. They will be decreasing the mattress recycling fee from $20 to $15. They say that the reason for that move is the fact that they are noticing illegal dumping of mattresses all over the city.