Ok so my husband and I have had several conversations this year about possibly getting rid of our trash/recycling pick-up. Before I go into any further details, let me first say that curbside waste pick-up in my city is privately owned so we get to pick our trash collector based on availability in our neighborhood and cost. From the little research that I've done, there are 3 options in our area. When we bought our house back in 2009, I was only aware of 2 options and chose the cheaper one. At that time, our cost was about $50 every 3 months for both trash and recycling curbside pick-up. Due to increasing fuel surcharges, we now pay about $67/68.
Now the main reason for my question is that over the last couple of years, my husband and I have decreased our garbage production by recycling as much as possible and composting a good portion of our food related trash. As a result, we really don't produce much trash. We fill a plastic grocery bag worth of trash maybe every two weeks. The trash can provided by our trash collector can hold 96 gallons of trash! It's been at least 2-3 months since I last put it out on the curb and it still wasn't full. We do however put out our recycling bin every week.
So what to do?
Some possible solutions:
- Call around to the 3 trash collectors and see if they can offer a lower rate
(my husband called our provider last year and they weren't willing to offer us a reduced cost for a reduction in frequency)
- Get rid of both services and start using the local recycling center for our recycling needs and find a local landfill/transfer station to drop off trash
(recycling center is about 9 miles away while the closest landfill & transfer station are 12 and 10 miles, respectively; would try and make these trips only a few times per year so as not to use too much gas)
- Get rid of both services and ask our friends who live several houses down from us if we could combine trash/recycling pick-up costs
(we would bring our trash/recycling down to their house every so often and pay them a small fee to do so, which would be much less than what we're paying now; what we pay them would help reduce their costs as well so it would be a win-win solution for all)
Thoughts?