Added Benefit of Recycling Keep Waste Out of Landfills

More and more homeowners across the United States are being provided with so called green bins to store their garden waste.  These containers generally are made of molded plastic and can hold a little over 60 gallons of material.  That is considerably more than the amount that standard sized trash cans used by households can accommodate.  Green bins will have a pair of wheels along the bottom so they can easily be rolled around.  The tops are hinged flaps with a crossbar above the hinge.  Since the bar is on the same side as the wheels it gives a person a place to grab hold of the bin, tilt it, and steer the bin around on the wheels.  The bar also gives a mechanical hoist on garbage trucks a place to grab the bin and hoist it up to empty.

This system is designed to collect organic waste that can be deposited onto compost heaps for processing by bacteria into mulch suitable for use in agriculture and in gardening.  The product has commercial worth and sale of such can help to lower the cost of garbage collection.  It also helps to save space in landfills thereby extending the amount of time that such places can be kept in use.

Many municipalities are having an increasingly difficult time finding new spots for landfills.  They must haul their trash to ever more remote locations since more densely populated regions will look askance at any new waste disposal sites being inaugurated in the vicinity of homes, offices, shops, and schools.  This can cause the cost of waste disposal to skyrocket.

Distance Adds Dollars to Waste Disposal Costs

Garbage trucks get poor mileage, only a few miles per gallon.  This is due both to their substantial weight, and a design that makes them aerodynamically inefficient.  Their bulky appearance is a sign that they are not streamlined and so their mileage is often no better on an open highway then it will be on city streets.  It is not cost effective to have them haul trash for any substantial distance.

Cities of considerable size have had to resort to storing trash at temporary sites for transfer onto rail cars that will then haul the material away to a more distant location.  This is an expensive system, but it will still end up costing less than having garbage trucks run out to distant locals.

Green bins reduce the need for doing this by allowing a considerable portion of what would otherwise be material that ends up in landfills to be diverted to recycling centers devoted to compost conversion.  In some suburban locals, half or more of the trash that needs to be disposed of consists of garden waste.

This is particularly true in some leafy town sites in New Jersey where the majority of the homes are located on large lots that are heavily vegetated.  Many of these communities are largely populated by people who commute in daily to New York City.  This means they are not so far from a major metropolis.  It also means that are very few wide open spaces within any reasonable distance where new landfills can be established without vehement opposition from some local association of home owners.