So... as a way to attempt to reduce waste, my city has established PAYT (pay as you throw). The idea is that people will reduce the amount of trash by recycling, composting, etc.
Well, these bags cost $10.00 a month (soon to be $13.50 a month) per roll. Depending on the size you get, you're paying between $1.50-$2.00 a bag. Of course that'll go up when the price increases.
The problem we currently have is this:
1) plastic bags are being used for the trash. It does no good attempting to reduce plastic bags when you're still using plastic bags for trash.
2) the bags rip very easily.
3) other cities have gone bagless for their trash and use a bin.
4)recyclables are open bin only and you cannot throw anything into the bins unless they have a recyclable triangle and even then half the stuff to recycle doesn't get recycled. Styrofoam? Yeah no we can't recycle it even with a triangle on it. Plastic with no triangle? Gets thrown into the street by lazy trash pickup guys so we have more litter than we do clean streets.
5)the bags don't pay for our recycling costs anyway.
EcoMaine has set up a bunch of stipulations and we can't even recycle most recyclables! What are we supposed to do with things if it can't be recycled?