Fisher: Garbage police? Give me a break
Thanks to my ever vigilant Palo Alto neighbors, always on the alert for
ed hardy signs that the city is becoming a police state, the Garbage Gestapo will not be coming to my town. Jackbooted
trash collectors will not paw through my garbage cans looking for contraband or drag me off to recycling re-education camp if I throw a cereal box or soda can in my trash can instead of recycling it.
I'm so relieved.
Oh sure, the Palo Alto public works department's mandatory recycling proposal made in March sounded innocuous enough. It even had a catchy slogan: "Recycle. It's not garbage anymore."
We were told that despite two decades of effort to persuade people to recycle, a recent survey found that 43 percent of the stuff thrown into the garbage should have been recycled. So the city proposed ratcheting up the pressure by placing warning
tags on garbage cans containing at least 10 percent recyclables. After a year, if people still didn't get the message, scofflaws could face fines or have their garbage service suspended.
How tough is it?
I guess I'm gullible, but I thought the proposal sounded reasonable. After all, recycling isn't hard. It takes very little effort to put the bottles, boxes and junk mail in one bin and the used Kleenex, table scraps and other messy stuff in another. If the city
must reduce its landfill usage, shouldn't we all have to do our share?
San Francisco, San Diego, Seattle and Portland already have
ed hardy t-shirts mandatory recycling laws that work just fine.
But folks with more finely tuned conspiracy radar than mine began to ask probing questions: Just exactly how would the trash collectors know when there were recyclables mixed in with the garbage? Would they go on witch hunts, ripping open plastic
bags full of rancid unmentionables in search of illicit aerosol cans and aluminum foil? Surely that would be a violation of our right to privacy, they said, an illegal search and seizure, or something equally nefarious. And what's next? Will the Internet Police barge
into our homes to make sure we're not tapping into our neighbor's wi-fi?
A slippery slope?
Thus the battle against the Garbage Gestapo began. At boisterous community meetings and in heated online exchanges, residents likened the mandatory recycling proposal to Big Brother, eco-fascism and the slippery slope.
The city gamely tried to counterattack, insisting that nobody would be opening plastic bags or sifting through trash. Collection crews already make a cursory inspection of the bins they pick up, we were told, and only if they noticed egregious violations, like
garbage cans filled with beer cans, would a bin get tagged. As for violating privacy rights, courts have ruled that trash doesn't belong to you once you place it on the curb.
But the city's response came too late. Once the
ed hardy sunglasses conspiracy theories had taken hold, facts became irrelevant.
So the city cried uncle. Last week, a wimped-out version of the mandatory recycling proposal was unveiled to a city council committee. There will be no tagging of garbage bins, no sanctions at all, just another two-year education campaign aimed at
convincing people that recycling can be more than a politically correct option for the Birkenstock crowd.
Personally, I'm certainly sleeping much better now, knowing that my right to be an irresponsible citizen is no longer in danger
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