City Adopts Color Coded Trash Bins

Stemming from a flood of complaints from three area residents, the City’s solid waste department is planning to unfold a brand new refuse collection program based on the successful color-coded label system used by several environmentally conscious communites around the United States. The program will be the first of its kind in Southern New Mexico.

Local woman Moonshine Freespirit was fed up paying for a service she did not use. “I was getting billed fifteen bucks a month for garbage I don’t have; it takes my household at least 8 weeks to fill up that big 96-gallon trash container. I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m getting ripped off – especially when I see all my neighbors with overflowing trash cans full of greasy pizza boxes, broken toys, and beer cans week after fucking week paying the same fee.”

Freespirit is referring to the City’s mandatory rule which requires residential properties within the city limits to pay a monthly fee for refuse collection. The current fee is $15.82 per month and includes weekly pickup of the 96-gallon trash containers, plus a biweekly Grappler “Takin’ It To The Street” pickup for bulky items that will not fit into the container, like stained mattresses and sun-warped plastic lawn toys.

Moonshine and her life partner, Honeymead Porter, decided to do something about it. Both hailing from Colorado Springs, they recalled the trash pickup system instituted there in 2002 after the city was unable to keep up with the massive amounts of garbage generated by its exploding population, particularly the huge emigration of Californian Cash-outs.

“They set up a three-tiered system based on how much waste people produce and charging them accordingly. By sticking the appropriate colored decal on your curbside bin, the garbage man could see instantly which bins to pick up on his route.”

Moonshine explained that households who ordered once- or twice-weekly trash pickup received American flag decals to express their patriotism; bi-weekly customers received plain red decals; those who opted for the monthly pickup received green decals of a tree with a smiley face; and fees were set at a simple $10 per pickup, paid on a monthly basis. The City of Las Cruces plans to copy this concept.

Said Porter, “Some people in Colorado Springs were so environmentally conscious they didn’t even have enough trash to justify a monthly pickup, so the city let them opt out of refuse collection entirely. I knew one guy who went to the county landfill with a Hefty bag just twice a year because he recycled or reused nearly all of his waste materials like glass jars and paperboard, and he didn’t buy plastic crap from China at the dollar store that broke after one use. All that shit just gets buried forever, ya know?”

Just north of Tucson, Arizona, the city of Marana has adopted a similar program to manage garbage.

“A majority of our residents are young families with at least one SUV parked in the driveway and soccer-playing children. For these residents, a weekly pickup of 96 gallons of garbage just wasn’t enough. People were complaining because coyotes were tearing into all the extra garbage bags stacked around the trash containers and scattering feces-smeared disposable diapers around the neighborhood,” said Marana Solid Waste spokesperson Frito Pendejo.

“A small percentage of our residents signed up for the colored decal system, but in addition to that we offered families the option to lease dumpsters for a weekly fee of $100. If they want to generate more waste in one week than someone in, say, Japan, generates in an entire year, then they should pay for its burial. Residents initially balked at the cost, but it’s working. Residents are now competing with each other to overfill their dumpsters as a display of wealth. Everyone is happy and some homes have even painted their dumpsters with Southwest icons like kokopelli and cactus to make them more attractive. It’s all about having freedom in this great land of ours.”

Freespirit and Porter presented the concept at a recent City Council meeting, which was unanimously approved after surveying trash output around Las Cruces on garbage pickup day and crunching some numbers. City representative Hank Hangman explained the quick decision. “Roughly 94% of residences we surveyed had garbage spilling out of their 96-gallon bins, absolutely filled to capacity in only seven days. Now, we could keep encouraging residents to bring their recyclable items to the bins at Walmart, but it’s like beating a dead horse. We rifled through a number of random trash containers and found that an average of 76% of the refuse consisted of Budweiser beer cans and plastic soda bottles, both of which are accepted at recycling centers around Las Cruces. What this means is most people prefer to throw everything in the garbage, and we want to accommodate that. For a fee.”

Las Cruces has no plans to offer residential dumpster service yet, but states it has been penciled in on the Vision 2040 plan for the next 35 years as the quality of manufactured goods made in China continues to decline and enters the waste stream more quickly.

All residents who currently have solid waste pickup services from the City will receive more information about the new color-coding program with their next monthly bill.