Trash billing policy is backwards

Here’s a question in search of an answer.
How come municipalities often have a surcharge for curbside pick-up of recyclables, while the cost of trash pick-up is hidden within the property tax budget?
Think about it for a second.
Municipalities want to reduce the flow of solid waste to landfills. They want to encourage recycling. But they’ve tacked an added charge onto the very behavior they want to encourage.
Meanwhile, the exact cost of trash pick-up, along with the related costs of landfill disposal, could be anybody’s guess.
In Portland, for instance, city crews do a great job of picking up the trash. But if the goal is to reduce the volume of trash headed to the landfill, shouldn’t there be a volume-related charge for hauling the stuff? Faced with a fee for trash pick-up, most folks would be more aggressive about recycling.
At the same time, instead of tacking on an extra fee for pick-up of recyclables, shouldn’t the city be doing everything it can to encourage recycling?
From a policy standpoint, the current situation seems exactly upside down.
But in some ways, that’s not surprising.
After all, when those policies were put in place — roughly 80 years ago — nobody had ever heard of recycling. For that matter, the notion of a sanitary landfill only became a topic of discussion about 50 years back. In those days, there was a city dump, which was exactly what it sounds like, and every household burned trash routinely.
If that sounds primitive, that’s because it was.
But today, those policies continue, probably due to that old devil “we’ve always done it that way.”
Doing that way, however, hasn’t made sense for some time.
Hasn’t the time come for Portland and other municipalities to re-think their trash and recyclables policies to encourage the behavior that’s in our best interest?
That’s a question that deserves an answer. —J.R