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Comment by ninalanyon | Hacker News Reader

> My local town gives you two free visits to the garbage transfer station per year.

Where I live in Norway the recycling station is open three days a week and I can take stuff there free as often as I like up to 2 000 kg of stuff per year.

It has never occurred to me that there would be a limit on the number of visits. Or have I misunderstood?

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Recycling dropoff is normally free in North America. Waste that cannot be recycled is typically charged by weight for the cost of disposal at waste facilities. You can visit either as often as you like, but will pay to have your garbage disposed of. The GP lives in a place where you do not have to pay for non-recyclable waste the first two times you visit per year. This is normally done to encourage people with a large volume of waste from a single cleanup to dispose of waste properly (dumping on vacant land is a big problem in many parts of NA).

Recycling drop-off is not free for me, and neither is having recycling picked up at the house. If I need to drop stuff off at the dump, it's a flat fee per drop-off with a limit of one trailer load per drop-off. Burn barrels are also illegal in Maricopa County, so Amazon boxes just go in the trash.

US here. where I am: Recycling is free, hazardous waste is open a few days a month (also free), appliances are free, and rubbish is measured by weight (they weigh your vehicle on the way in and out). They pay you to take metal.

Without any fee beyond the required annual solid waste bill, my municipality will let me set out up to 20 (!) bags of trash per week with up to 50 lb (!) in them every week. I can throw out two tons of trash per month without having to haul anything anywhere or pay any extra fees.

Clearly this is madness, but it does make it a lot easier to throw shit out than put it in a storage unit.

Trust me, given how many people just accumulate trash because it's expensive, that's an absolutely sane and excellent policy. As a society, we want people to use trash disposal, because the alternative is expensive, painful, and disgusting.

You can literally tell which municipalities in my state have been hoodwinked by the Karens into adopting "pay as you throw". They're the ones where there's trash everywhere.

It's like these people can't think two steps ahead (I'd go so far as to say that's the defining feature of regulatory policy in this state). You just gave people a financial incentive to litter and dump.

Which state so I can avoid it?

Alaska was like this. Taking your trash to the transfer station or dump was expensive, so people throw it all over the place, trashing the highways and vacant land, or they use burn barrels and cause massive pollution torching plastic and other things. It's pretty horrifying to see such beautiful areas littered up :-(

Alaska has an excuse for it to be expensive. They're far away from everything.

Most of the US East coast has no such excuse.

>hazardous waste is open a few days a month

Are you serious? Here in NH it's either once or twice a year. I call it "The real Father's Day" and plan to have a couple of podcasts or similar queued up for the wait in line.

In Copenhagen (and I think it's similar in most of Denmark) there's a fireproof cupboard in the basement of my apartment building for hazardous waste. Houses have a small red box they can leave out if they have something.

Making hazardous waste disposal inconvenient seems like a good way to have it end up in the normal waste stream.

https://affald.kk.dk/affaldsfraktion/saadan-sorterer-du-farl...

> Making hazardous waste disposal inconvenient seems like a good way to have it end up in the normal waste stream.

This is exactly what often happens

Oh very much so. By the time I finally got to a hazardous waste day early enough to make it tolerable, the milk crate full of various poisons and extremely flammable toxins I had would have put low-level terrorist orgs to shame. I might as well have had a glowing suitcase.

> Here in NH it's either once or twice a year

Good god! Why on earth would you make it difficult to dispose of hazardous waste safely?

Here in Blighty, the local tip (sorry 'recycling centre') is open throughout the week and accepts everything from used engine oil and battery acid to asbestos. Granted some of the smaller tips might not have such facilities, but they will direct you to one that will.

All free of charge for non-commercial users. (Business will have their own regulated arrangements for hazardous goods).

Where I live (America, but waste processing is all handled at the local level and policies differ), the landfill has a "resident convenience center" with a bunch of dropoff stations for various types of stuff, along with a big ledge you can toss things over to be sent to the landfill. When you arrive, and attendent will ask and/or look at what you have and tell you where to put it. Sometimes the answer is "you can't dump that for free. Go to the transfer station and pay by the pound".

In theory, there is also an annual wait limit to free dumps, but they can't actually enforce it.

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