PAY AS YOU THROW (PAYT)

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Pay As You Throw is the future!

Pay As You Throw is here to stay.

Over 6000 U.S. municipalities now use this method of cost accounting for their municipal waste collection, and the number keeps growing.

Massachusetts is one of the leaders, where currently 120 communities "Pay As They Throw." What is it, you ask? It's the same way you pay for your water, your electricity, your natural gas, virtually every other utility or municipal service you receive. It's simple, it's fair and it encourages recycling. Pay As You Throw means you pay according to how much garbage you produce! This creates a direct economic incentive to recycle more and to generate less waste.

Brilliant, eh?

Most "PAYT" programs keep track of number of bags, whereas some gauge by weight. There are many options, but a common example is: Resident pays a yearly fee which covers the town's fixed costs of waste disposal. This fee includes 104 "free" bags, or 2 per week. Additional bags, if needed, can then be purchased by the resident from local merchants - supermarkets, drugstores, etc. Research and experience show that a well planned PAYT program can save a community considerable money by raising their recycling rates, simultaneously lowering their municipal waste disposal tonnage.

Here are some handy dandy PAYT sites:

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Massachusetts Dept. of Environmental Protection
Wikipedia
Rhode Island Resource Recovery
MSW Management ("The Rise and Rise of Pay As You Throw")

Interesting tidbits:

*Worcester, MA has a hugely successful PAYT program.
*The entire state of Rhode Island will soon switch over to PAYT
*Cohasset, MA, Population 7,750, similar to Chatham: Saved $100,000 in their first year of  PAYT