By the end of 2017, the City of Denver will have completely phased out dumpsters in favor of cart-based trash service. Charlotte Pitt, manager of Denver Recycles and Solid Waste Management, understands that that’s a controversial statement.

“There was a lot of fear when we took dumpsters away,” Pitt says of the process that began four years ago. “We heard comments when we visited with neighborhood organizations and residents to talk about transitioning, and one of the big fears was that ‘Trash carts aren’t going to hold all my waste,’ or ‘I’m not going to remember my trash day,’ and ‘What about the elderly and disabled people?’ ‘Where am I going to put my cart?’” But when she circled back to the neighborhood groups after the change, Pitt found that their fears had been just that: fears.

In 2010, Denver drew up a plan to more effectively manage waste. Serious changes needed to be made: Solid Waste Management was collecting 220,000 tons of trash a year, or 440,000,000 pounds, and most of it was either compostable or recyclable. Another big problem was illegal dumping, much of which Pitt suspected came from contractors and small businesses. So four years ago, the city started replacing dumpsters with individual carts that homeowners and apartment-dwellers roll out to the street for pick-up on designated days.

The theory behind the trash cart is simple: The smaller the end container, the more people will think about what they’re throwing away. And it seems to be working. Last year, the city collected 30,000 tons less trash than in 2010; since 2015, there has been a 140-pound reduction on average per household. What’s more, “What we’ve seen as we’ve rolled out the carts are more people are reporting illegal dumping when it happens now,” Pitt says. “Whereas someone may have in the past put extra waste besides a dumpster with the idea that we would see it [and pick it up], now if someone does dump, we get a call pretty quickly that it happens.”

It’s not a perfect system. Prowl Denver’s streets and alleys, and you’ll surely come across piles of trash — sofas, old TVs — mounded by the new carts. Those carts aren’t immediately feasible for every home and apartment building, either, especially in denser areas of the city. According to Pitt, some leasing companies and landlords are more cooperative than others and will make space for a few carts — though technically, every unit the city services is eligible for one. “Either the building will say, ‘Hey, we don’t need [individual] trash carts; we’ll share,’ [or] in other instances…we’ve seen individual units say, ‘No, I want my own trash cart, but I don’t generate that much…so I’ll opt into the smallest-sized trash cart.’” (Residents should call 311 to change the size of their carts.)

But a fundamental issue with Denver’s waste-management program remains the way that residents are charged for trash pick-up. Unlike some cities that bill for the service directly and hit up big wasters for more, households here aren’t directly charged for trash services; the fee is incorporated into our taxes. “If you look at any city across the country that’s achieving high waste diversion — Seattle, San Francisco, Portland — all of them have some sort of pay-as-you-throw structure,” Pitt says. “It treats waste as a utility, where you pay for how much you use. That’s an industry best-management practice to achieve higher waste-diversion goals.”

To read the full story, visit http://www.westword.com/news/denver-will-swap-dumpsters-for-black-trash-bins-by-the-end-of-2017-8981909.

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