Rubbish Collection & Recycling

[FDNYLiberty]

Got a question for you good folks.

I am one of the spoiled east coasters who has curbside trash collection 2x per week and recyle material (cans, bottles etc) 1x per week.

How is trash collected out in the rural areas? Recyclables? Do you have to haul your trash to city/county dump? I am particularly iterested in what they do in Crook County. Any info on other rural areas is also helpful.

Thanks for the info. 

[manfromnevada]

I don't know about the three towns in Crook. Maybe someone else can elaborate, but out here in the county you have to take your trash to the nearest dump. There's one in Sundance. One in Belle Fourche (my favorite). I would guess there's one in Hulett and Moorcroft.

Recycling? You're showing your east coast accent!
Gladly we don't have those nanny state container taxes (recycling fees) added to every darn container we buy. If YOU want to save them up and take them to maybe Cheyenne, then fine, otherwise they're your purchased property to do with as you see fit.
In fact, if you see a 20oz bottle of soda at the convenience store for $1.89, you know what you actually pay at the register? ONE DOLLAR AND EIGHTY-NINE CENTS! Amazing, huh? Yeah, no tax on food including that evil soda that other "food taxless" states tax you on.

I do sometimes see a set of containers in the Gillette WM parking lot.

The dumps here are CHEAP, especially BF (above). I think there's a minimum of $2 or so for less than 150 lbs. The most we've ever paid is maybe $5 for a few hundred pounds of drywall scraps and stuff like that. Back in CA, it cost something like $40 to get rid of a water heater at the dump! In NV, the local dump was FREE to induce folks not to dump in the desert (the idiots still dumped stuff out there especially at "shooting sites" where you'd find a huge collection of total junk masquerading as targets).

Mac

[Crappiewy]

Sundance dump is not cheap for county people. It is almost cheaper to haul it all the way to Cheyenne.
The people who owned my place before me thought that they would just try to turn everything into fertilizer. Just piled in in large piles and plastic bags and waited...

[Beulahtrash]

Burn it.

[MamaLiberty]

Check to make sure burning is "allowed" where you live first.

I guess some people would rather folks dumped into the prairie.

Oh, and there was a recent investigation of landfill locations, something like 96% of them "leaking." They didn't say what they leaked. Probably something horribly polluting like WATER or ??  Might leak methane, but that's easily cured. Just burn it!

Back where we started. 

[kunkmiester]

Buy a 3D printer for those bottles--if you can extrude the filament for the printer, you can make anything out of it.

[HardwareHank]

Here in Park County... a couple enterprising people went into the business of collecting trash.

I'm out in the proverbial sticks, and I pay $30 a month for the service. They provide me with a dumpster and they empty it every 2 weeks.

I have a couple neighbors who insist on burning their dirty diapers, used motor oil and plastic milk jugs... but thankfully.. rumor is they're behind on their mortgages.

[Stratispho]

This doesn't answer the OP's question but is related. Has anyone looked into a home sized version of the Plastic to gas/oil/kerosene converters they are making? I've seen a few Youtube video's and heard a few companies are making huge facilities to do this now. But the machines I saw in Youtube were saying that they were cheap enough they were going to try to give them to "poor countries" to recycle the plastics into fuel to run water pumps and filters.

[Jackpot]

We used to have blue dumpsters in Sundance, but the city of Sundance botched it up enough to go ahead and cancel them.  Theres a couple of companies around here that will pick up your trash if you live in the sticks and they have multiple sizes of garbage cans.  The best so far is C&W waste services, Im trying to talk the owner Cort into starting a recycling program that you as the customer could pay to have picked up.  I know that seems like alot but at least we'd have the choice to recycle which to some of us is important.....namely my wife.

[manfromnevada]

When we passed thru Moorcroft this week I noticed recycling containers on one of the main corners.

Mac

[MamaLiberty]

If recycling was an economically viable operation, wouldn't there be lots of companies bidding for your trash? Why is there no place to take even aluminum for recycling here? The only recycling efforts I'm aware of are done with vast government subsidies and/or mandatory collection. Don't have the links right now, but I've read that much of what is collected in cities supposedly for recycling gets dumped with everything else eventually. Nice job security for more government tax feeders.

Recycling costs too much and returns too little. That's why nobody but government is doing it.

[Terence]

Recycling is a manufacturing process that does not pay for itself with current technologies.
See this excellent article and Mises intstitute video presentation by Floy Lilley:

The Economics of Recycling
http://www.lewrockwell.com/lilley/floy14.1.html

Floy's presentation on recycling
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PndeWksuTjg


Terence

[MamaLiberty]

Thanks for the links, Terence! I recognize the one from LRC.

[manfromnevada]

We went to the Belle Fourche dump today. Here's the specifics:
We brought 180 lbs of household trash including mostly drywall scraps.

$42.90 per ton is the rate (there are other rates for dead animals, etc)
We had 0.09 tons.
$3.86 + $0.23 sales tax = $4.09 total.

One helluva deal. Quick in and out. No waiting.

Mac

[Terence]

$4.09 for 180 lbs?  They must have been trying to save you money
so you could pay for that exorbitant electricity bill!

Terence