Saint Paul’s new garbage hauling program is a rousing success and if you don’t vote to continue it, taxes will increase dramatically to pay for the five-year contract the City illegally signed.
Mayor Carter’s statements in the linked article defy common sense, casting doubt on his credibility.
We have significantly reduced emissions from our garbage trucks. Really? You monitor that, somehow, and have data to prove it? Can I see it?
We have significantly reduced wear and tear on our streets, too many potholes. Really? In just the few months the program has been in operation, you’ve been able to measure the wear and tear on streets, and have data to prove it? Can I see it?
We have significantly reduced truck traffic through neighborhoods where children are playing. What, in the streets? Well, there’s your problem right there – those kids gotta learn to stop running out in front of garbage trucks.
And Hizzonor is going to address gun violence, not by hiring new cops but by having a meeting with his cabinet, as soon as we can get those key players together. What’s the hold-up? They’re your cabinet, Mel. Don’t they report to you?
It sounds as if the Mayor is reciting talking points, not taking action. I wonder if that’s because he has no idea what to do about the mess he finds himself in?
Am I the only one getting the impression this Mayor is not ready for prime time?
Joe Doakes
Why, it’s almost if the Saint Paul DFL has taken “Perception is Reality” to its logical extreme.
All people in St Paul need to get out and vote for city council this election. Getting responsible people elected to the council is the only way citizens are going to get listened to on all of the issues facing the city, including the trash vote. Most of the current council members will care less if we vote Yes or No. If they cared, they would have listened to the petition that told them what they were doing was against the city charter. If they did care, they would have admitted they were wrong and offered a new plan when they court said they were wrong. Instead, they threaten. Here is something from the MinnPost that breaks down where the candidates stand on the trash issue at least: http://www.minnpost.com/metro/2019/10/is-garbage-enough-to-get-upstart-candidates-elected-to-the-st-paul-city-council/
Idea for new sitcom. The woke boy mayors of two midwestern sister cities compete against one another to bedazzle their supporters with their urbane sophistication and advanced ideology even as their respective cities dissolve into violence and economic ruin. Did I say sitcom? Never mind.
Rom-com, golfdoc. The woke boy mayors of two midwestern sister cities compete against one another until they find that they’re utterly and hopelessly attracted to each other. Then Trump does something that separates them (this is the “boy loses girl” part), and so they stop competing and work together to make MN a better place… and scene.
It’s high-time we stopped the senseless slaughter of our children by garbage trucks running them down! There is blood in the streets, my friend!
Of course, the blood running in the streets isn’t coming from garbage truck violence.
If wear and tear on the streets from 20 ton garbage trucks imposes an intolerable burden because they’re traversing streets (assuming 5 companies in a neighborhood) five times a week, what about city buses of the same weight traversing those same streets hundreds of times a day? And if traffic mitigation is a big deal, maybe….see how many moms quit work if we eliminate daycare subsidies for the middle and upper classes?
Oh, you mean their real goal is more money and power for government, not our well-being? Oh.
You act like it is hard to reduce the emissions, pot holes, and traffic caused by garbage trucks by 50%.
Just cut your pickups in half
Problem solved..
One of the things I will miss when I move to the mainland is our trash collection system here on the Big Island.
There isn’t any.
Instead we have “transfer stations.” You take your garbage to the transfer station and dump it into a trailer/container. When it is full, the county hauls the trailer a hundred miles away to the landfill.
There is no recycling. There used to be voluntary recycling, but China stopped taking our garbage a while ago.
Trash disposal is easy. Find cheap land, dig a big hole, line it, throw trash in it, setup a water treatment plant to process the liquid. It’s science, not rocket science.
It’s science, not rocket science.
Actually, it’s engineering. One of the few areas still not corrupted by SJWs.
MP,
It’s not that the Chinese totally stopped taking our garbage, especially cardboard and plastic. They upped the purity level to 98%. This put a bigger burden on recyclers when do gooders that don’t recycle properly, put a greasy pizza box in their recycling bin. If someone at the recycling facility doesn’t catch it, it can contaminate a whole load of cardboard.
I am not happy about having to become a recycler. It is insane, it does not pay for itself, it is just a hobby our rules use to kill time “Hey/ let’s make the monkeys sort their garbage using arbitrary rules! And make them pay for it!”
Have there been studies on disposing of waste in one of the Hawaiian volcanoes?
Too intermittent. There has been no hot lava on the surface for over a year. Also there are cultural issues.
There is nothing wrong with landfills! Modern landfills are the way to go. It is not worth the energy cost to recycle glass and plastics. Glass is made out of sand, for cryin’ out loud. Plastic is produced as a by product of distilling oil. Paper comes from trees. Recycling is the madness of our age.
One of the best comments I’ve heard about recycling is that maybe it makes sense to use landfills as mines for valuable minerals as the organic materials rot away. I believe it was Tracy at Anti-Strib about a decade back.
Engineering-wise, I’m under the impression that it makes a lot of sense to recycle steel and aluminium, some sense to recycle glass and paper, and little sense at all to recycle plastics.
Another reality; about 2/3 of the weight of a typical garbage or recycling truck is the truck itself. So if you return recycling to the bottlers and scrap metal dealers, you get rid of a huge part of the impact on roads.
Bike, curiously, when Soucheray and Reusse were doing more shows together, back in the 80s and 90s, it was Reusse who was saying the very same thing about using landfills as mines.
… and that was a really interesting comment about the demands for “pure” or clean goods for recycling. Didn’t know that. Thanks, boss.
It makes sense to recycle some metals. They only exist near the earth’s surface in concentration because they were captured and concentrated by micro organisms tens or hundreds of millions years ago. The geology is interesting; bacteria and algae collected iron hundreds of millions of years ago, then plate tectonics pushed the old seabed up, back to the surface millions of years later. Ditto copper. We are pulling iron and copper out of the earth much faster than it is being resupplied.
But people want to recycle plastic and paper, and those are renewable resources.