Pay As You Throw, Fiscally Conservative & Socially Progressive

CC image on Flickr by Bill Ward

Tonight the Brattleboro Selectboard is likely to reverse a previous decision which rejected Pay As You Throw (PAYT) garbage pickup. Brattleboro, like many towns, doesn't charge you directly to pick up and haul garbage. Instead garbage collection and pickup is part of the town's general budget and is therefore payed by property owners based on their property taxes.

It's an unfair system. I have no reason not to throw out large amounts of garbage every week. I have no reason to recycle. And anyone who does limit their trash and recycles what they can is actually paying more so that I can do whatever I want. PAYT makes the system fair. If I want to be wasteful, I still can. But now I will have to shoulder the cost of the waste myself. People have controll over their expenses.

A likely scenario for PAYT in Brattleboro will be that every 30 gallon trash bag you throw out will cost $2. Over the course of a year, if you throw out one bag a week (which I average) it will cost you only $104. If on the other hand, you have no interest in sorting your recycling out, composting, or reducing your waste, you will pay significantly more. I will not have to support your bad habits when my landlord would raise my rent because his property taxes increase.

The great things about PAYT are that you the consumer are in control of your expenses, you do not have to subsidize other people's wastefulness, and it encourages everyone to conserve, recycle, and compost.

Kill a What? At the Library?

Kill A Watt on the shelf: Photo by Katie

I don't know about you, but I love the library. Mine is a very good one. In Williamsburg, I got fed up with it's branch of the Brooklyn Public Library which was only open till seven one day of the week. It had a decent selection of comic books, but every other section in the library was lacking. I haven't visited it in two years. But the Brooks Memorial Library is open till nine three nights a week. It has a variety of new and old books, magazines, CDs, VHS casettes, DVDs, and one more thing: a Kill A Watt.

Kill A Watt is a brand of electricity usage monitor. You can buy various electricity usage monitors for anywhere from $25 to $100. They have different bells and whistles, but you really don't need to use them very often. You take the Kill A Watt, plug it into the wall, and then plug your 120v appliances into them for a day or more. The Kill A Watt measures how much electricity runs through it and how much time has elapsed. You can use this to find phantom loads (the electricity used by things that are turned off) as well as to find out how much electricity it takes to do something like watch your favorite television show. It can help you remember to unplug appliances that are wasting energy.

Kill A Watt in its box: Photo by Katie

But I'm done with it, I've had it for two weeks and I don't need it any more. So it's fantastic that I don't own it and can just return it to the library. Someone else can use the same Kill A Watt that I've been using, and I don't have to know them or give it to them. This is part of a state-wide program from the Sustainable Energy Resource Group and they should be available in many Vermont libraries. But if you're not in Vermont, many other libraries have them available too. If your library doesn't, ask for them to get one.

The Road Home

Source: Creative Commons image on Flickr by Professor Bop

I've moved out of Brooklyn, to the beautiful rolling hills of Southern Vermont. Hikes up green mountains, riverside bike trips, and strolls downtown are all available to me. Walkscore gives my apartment a 92 out of 100. But the coop which is two blocks away isn't listed, and a restaurant in nearby Wilmington is supposedly just a couple of blocks away, I submitted changes for both of those items in Google Maps for good measure. Katie and I are both happy with the new lifestyle.

Next week I will start a certificate program in Renewable Energy/Energy Efficiency at Greenfield Community College. The program should give me a hand in transitioning my career to one of green renovation and rehabilitation. A lot of people seem to be coming around because of high fuel prices, but some people are thinking deeper about it. Earlier this week Katie and I went to see Tom Silva and Kevin O'Connor from This Old House at the ReStore in Springfield. The house that they were finishing up was actually a new house, but the owners had Tom and the crew of the ReStore dismantle the previous house after they could not find anyone to give the house away to. The remains were given to Habitat for Humanity and the ReStore and 90% of the teardown was diverted from a landfill.

Construction is a much bigger consumer of energy than normal home heating, but the costs are hidden in the prices of goods. So even though the house that they built on This Old House, wasn't technically old, the building philosophy is similar to renovating an old house.