Starting on November 1, Sheridan will begin a pilot ‘pay-as-you-throw’ program to see if it can improve its waste diversion. “‘Pay-As-You Throw’ is metered trash collection and it just treats that utility like all the others. The more trash you throw away, the more you pay. The less you throw away, the less you pay,” said Sheridan City Councilman Jacob Martin, who proposed the idea to the City Council.
The goal of the study is to see if residents start recycling more, and lower the amount they put in the garbage. Throwing away less means residents can save money on their solid waste bill. Martin said he’s always been interested in sustainability and thought ‘pay-as-you throw’ would help Sheridan become more environmentally friendly. “It fit really well that already had a lot of the pieces in place that make the program effective. So, one of those is curbside recycling, we already have that. We have a great team at the landfill. And the recycling center needs some capital improvements, but, overall it’s really well run,” he said.
Sheridan Utilities Director Dan Roberts said they designed the program to be structured by the size of a trash can. For the pilot program, residents will have three options to choose from.
So a 35-gallon container, a 65-gallon container and a 95-gallon container. And the 95- [gallon] is, by comparison, the standard cart, we call them, cart size. People have a choice to stay with the standard cart size, or they can reduce to one of the smaller ones,” Roberts said.
He said the idea is that the smaller cans will cost less and save residents money. The pilot area includes 729 households in the southwest part of Sheridan that covers a range of demographics. Roberts said the city has received around 500 responses to surveys sent out to the pilot area.