The result is... Four different garbage trucks from four different companies clatter through my neighborhood in the early-morning hours of four different days of the week.
decibels emitted * estimated fraction of the population sleeping at the hour services are delivered * population size affected
And if you allocate the contract city-wide each year very quickly there is only one company that CAN fulfill the contract.
I’d love to see something like an electric dumpster that collects the smaller cans and then goes to a main location to be truck collected.
Your point about there being only one company that can fulfill the contract is a good one. My suggestion was to vote for what fraction of city contracts should be assigned to which commercial providers. I haven't worked out exact details of how this voting would work -- maybe voters could upvote/downvote service providers reddit style, and their contract percentages could be adjusted accordingly. But the overall thought was that if company A is currently providing 100% of Centerville waste services, and company B from Borderville is looking to expand into Centerville, they try to convince voters to assign 5% of Centerville waste disposal contracts to company B.
Monopolies arise because it is an individual's best interest to buy whichever option is cheapest. But it is in our collective best interest to have healthy competition. By having voters vote on what % of contracts should go to which provider, they end up choosing in our collective best interest, and keeping providers on their toes by maintaining a bit of diversity.
It's a bit of a wacky idea, I just had it this morning actually. My larger point is there is a disappointing lack of willingness to discuss and run small scale experiments on wacky ideas that could totally work :-D For example, the scheme I described incentivizes companies to tattle on each other for bad behavior like harming the environment! Isn't that interesting? It also goes a long way to address the classic problem of charter schools trying to goose their test scores by kicking out low-performing students.