I’m originally from Germany but currently live in the US. In the various cities we’ve lived in, you can leave as much trash as you want outside, and the collection service will take it.
In Germany, however, you only have a small bin that gets emptied every two weeks. While I can understand this in Germany, it seems even more inconvenient here in the US to drive out to a rural area to dispose of trash rather than having it picked up during weekly collections.
In the cities we’ve resided in, trash is typically collected twice a week, sometimes even three times. Although I know some dump sites are filled commercial waste, I often noticed they were filled with regular household trash.
Comments
People are assholes
Americans are lazy.
Not all cities/towns offer curbside pickup. We have it in my town but we can only put out 3 bags/week. Many more rural areas have no trash pickup at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_dumping
> The reasons people dump illegally vary; however, research indicates that lack of legal waste disposal options is a primary factor. A shortage of legal disposal options drives demand for waste removal service, increasing prices. Studies also have found unit pricing, which involves charging a set price per bag of garbage thrown out, contribute to illegal dumping. Although the intent of unit pricing is to encourage people to use other forms of waste disposal such as recycling and composting, people often turn to disposing of waste in unauthorised areas to save money. Additionally, weak enforcement of laws prohibiting illegal dumping and a lack of public awareness regarding the environmental, health, and economic dangers of illegal dumping contribute.
You have to pay extra to have that kind of trash removed. People of lower socioeconomic status might be used to just dumping illegally instead of paying for the service.
Where my partner’s family is from, they just burn all extra trash including big items like furniture in their backyard. Cheaper I suppose. Especially after they cleaned the house out. I was surprised when I heard about this since I live in a city, but it’s normal there where there are less trash disposal options.
But even in my city you’ll still see larger items dumped on the sides of the road or the highways. If you live in an apartment I’d suppose it’s even harder to get rid of large trash.
Not in the us but Canada. If things are similar it may be because there is a limit on the number of bags you’re allowed to put out. Where I am 6$ per bag in excess.
That said as long as you recycle and compost, that is never a thing that happens.
My theory is those entitled and lazy enough to dump it are also those too entitled and lazy to recycle and thus have excess garbage to get rid of
In some parts of the USA waste disposal is privatized, so it costs more money to have those trash cans than places where waste is handled by the city. Also, many parts of the country where waste disposal is privatized there are no home pickup recycling options (not profitable), so people do not bother to separate their recycling from trash.
Where services are privatized, disposing of onsite cleanup and other large amounts of trash costs a lot of money to take to a dump, so people find illegal ways to dump it.
Where im at trash cans are picked up weekly. Anything that’s not in the bin isn’t picked up except for when heavy trash is picked up which is every 2 months. 1 month is tree limbs and the next is all trash, then repeat. There is till a local dump to take things to though. Some things they dont take though, so if you have those items then you need to find a special place to trash/recycle. All in all though people dump trash elsewhere because they’re lazy sacks of garbage.
Costs money for extra trash…a lot too. Vacuum cleaner about $40, pc monitor about $30 each as examples. TVs can be $50 each. Chemicals (old gas, oil, etc) all cost money to dispose of.
I forgot to mention arranged pickups for these special items too. I just drove to the recycling receiving depot and paid via credit card.
In the US there’s basically 2 main reasons why people do it that I know of.
First is that it’s pretty common for only cities and larger towns to have trash service rolled into other mandatory fees (it’s often tied to water and sewage, sometimes tied to property taxes), but even that’s not universal. So if you live in a smaller town or outside city limits you usually have to pay separately for curb service, and you may need to pay a dump fee to take it to designated collection points or even to the dump directly. So some people just … avoid the fee.
The second is that large items, such as old tires, furniture, and the like, are not usually covered in said curbside pickup service. So rather than paying extra or taking it to the dump you just kinda… tip it on the side of the road somewhere. Similarly, if you’re doing a big cleanup job then you may have too much trash to be picked up with regular service and would have to pay extra. A lot of those giant piles of residential trash inside cities are from unscrupulous businesses who get paid to do “spring cleaning” type jobs and haul away people’s trash and then make a little extra by not taking it to the dump.
The city I grew up in started a “dump day” program where once a year they set up big collection points at a few places across the city for the sort of thing that normally requires an extra fee and anyone who can prove they live in the city can come and just dump it. It was so wildly successful at reducing the amount of stuff dumped on the side of the road that they expanded it to 4 times a year and it still saves them more money on dealing with illegally dumped trash than it costs to operate the dump days.
Are you seeing people actively litter or are you just seeing the trash? There are multiple reasons why you could be seeing trash, including:
People are lazy assholes and they litter.
The wind blew the trash out of a trash can. This happens in my neighborhood all the time.
In my neighborhood, we get trash service once per week and the trash collectors will NOT take anything that isn’t in the bin. So that leaves people overflowing trash bins, perfect for the wind to pick up trash and blow it around the neighborhood. Also, the trash collectors never leave their truck so if trash falls out while collecting it, it’s not getting picked up.
Putting it on the curb is illegally dumping it where I live.
Some Americans dump trash on the street to make a political statement. They sometimes do this even when it would be easier to dump it in a trash can.
Where I live in the suburbs we get trash pick up Tuesday and Friday, my community has a dumpster at the entrance to our road, the only limit is house hold trash and pet waste, no large items like mattresses or couches.
Where I lived in a rural area we got trash picked up once a month.
A reason not mentioned so far:
Shady contractors who want to save a few bucks make up a fair portion of illegal dumping.
Curbside and/or free/very cheap municipal waste disposal facilities are often only available to residential customers who live in the jurisdiction. Commercial customers have to pay, especially for any hazardous materials with defined disposal requirements.
Trash pickup is not actually that common in the US, you have been very lucky to routinely live somewhere with it.
Also people are lazy.
People in the United States can’t just put trash on the curb for pickup.
Rather, people in cities and towns (which are in the United States) can put trash on the curb. My city taxes pay for my trash and recycling. However, my parents, in a different town, used to have to take their trash to the dump themselves every week. Their town taxes did pay for the maintenance of a dump, but not pickup.
(And, living in Massachusetts and mentioning a town dump, I am having a great deal of trouble preventing myself from mentioning Stockbrige, Massachusetts, American Thanksgiving, and the Vietnam War… you remember Alice, right? There’s a song about her….)
A lot of it is from shady contractors who have large amounts of stuff to throw out: old toilets, scraps of old wood and drywall, all the other stuff that’s leftover from gutting a house.
A legit contractor pays the city dump to take this stuff. The shitty ones don’t want to pay, so they dump it in the woods in a city park.
Some people are just wired differently. They either don’t see trash and clutter as a bad thing or they have become insensitive to it. I hate seeing our roads lined with garbage- it drives me crazy. I also clean trash out of my car and tidy my house on a regular basis.
The people who will throw a fast food bag out the window are generally the same people who would drag their couch out to the vacant lot 2 miles down the road. Sometimes these folks do actually keep their private spaces reasonably tidy-but the people I know who are the biggest slobs also have no problem just dumping their trash wherever. I asked a coworker why he thought it was ok to toss lottery tickets out the window and he said “someone else will pick them up”.
Curbside collection costs so many dollars per can/bag. Some wont take certain items and it can get expensive
Not American, but Canadian.
Yes we can put our garbage at the curbside once a week, but our municipality has a two bag limit on what they will pickup. We can buy ‘tags’ for an extra bag, but even then they will only pick up 3 in total. So people that have excessive garbage tend to look elsewhere to dump it.
See, in the United States, we do a thing where we pay high taxes almost like you do in Europe (though we break them up into lots of smaller taxes & “levels” of taxation like federal, state, county, city & local so they don’t seem as high but really are)… but we just don’t get any public services for them.
We still have to pay for our water, our power, our sewer line access, recycling (sometimes mandated by law), and trash removal. Also ambulance service; even if we have health insurance it’s usually not covered. We’re probably a decade or less away from having to pay for snow plowing, firefighters or police directly, on top of our taxes. Even places that have public transporation like buses & trains charge for them, and they get more expensive every year, too.
Yes, we get Social Security (at an older age than most other western nations; France just burned down half their country in protest of increasing their benefits age to 3 years short of what ours has been for decades), and Medicaid has been expanding since conventional health insurance is becoming more unaffordable and less useful every year. But, aside from that and other specialist programs (like SNAP for the truly destitute, WIC to feed the children of the destitute, etc.), all we appear to get from our taxes are subsidies for megacorporations that are already profitable beyond the wildest dreams of avarice, and a military capable of taking on at least half the rest of the developed world at once…
People who illegally dump trash are lazy and/or cheap. Some cities have organized systems with bins and trucks that automatically transfer the trash, recycles or yard waste (each is a separate bin) into the truck. Other places, like the city I live near, currently just lets people who any bag-like container on the curb. It gets picked up once a week. I understand the city wants to switch to some kind of bin system to make pickup days less smelly.
My suburban town provides each house with a separate bin for trash, limited recycles, and yard waste. The yard waste bin is 95 gallons (~360 liters). There are different sizes for the other two bins. Both of mine are 60 gallons (~228 liters). We put all 3 bins out on the same day every week. A separate truck for each type automatically transfers the contents of the bin to the truck without anyone getting out of the truck. That’s very convenient. Of course, if the bin is full, that’s your limit (it happens sometimes).
Every town around mine limits how much you can out of for trash. If you want to put out more, you have to buy special trash bags to put the extra trash out for pickup. I used to live in a town that had no trash pickup. I had to bring it to the transfer station.
Because the trash you’re dumping in the bin is way different than the trash being dumped in rural areas
I work at a class 3 landfill. We only take construction debris, furniture, tires, and yard waste, not stinky garbage from the kitchen for example
This kind of stuff you can’t just toss in a regular garbage bin, especially if you’re working construction or something of the sort. Many smaller companies that operate privately will do some small scale construction and have a lot of debris to dump. Well, it costs them money to come to the landfill and dump this demolition.
It’s free to go out into a hidden, empty field and dump it there.
Also, we have restrictions at the landfill. We don’t take batteries, televisions or most electronics. So when a company is hired to clean out a foreclosed house, they have to sort through the stuff and make sure they don’t get fined for trying to dump that stuff.
Again, not an issue with a big empty field.
All the things others have said, and more recent contributor is house flippers. Half the posts I see in local pages about dumping it’s almost always construction waste. The nearest public recycling bins to me were constantly full of drywall, old cabinets, old carpet, and other flipper detritus. Shady contractors trying to save money on dump fees. Flippers are a blight
My US city only picks up once a week, and it has to be in the bin. Anything outside the bin is left there. You also have to pay for it. And they don’t do curbside pickup at apartments.
You might be forgetting the vast size of the US – there is not ever just one way to do things across states and cities.
While I live in New Jersey, it’s a quite rural area far from any “big city” services. Here we have to pay to have a private service pick up our trash. My weekly trash and recycling service costs me about $450 per year.
Not everyone wants to pay that, sadly.
I put mine on the curb. It’s $6/ per bag of trash.
Curbside is not always available and is often expensive. Also, sometimes a bag on the roadside is from a highway cleanup crew and will be picked up, or it fell out of a truck on the way to the dump. It is not always illegal dumping.