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Earth Government The Almighty Buck

Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food 385

Posted by samzenpus from the food-police dept.
schwit1 writes The new rules would allow garbage collectors to inspect trash cans and ticket offending parties if food and compostable material makes up 10 percent or more of the trash. The fines will begin at $1 for residents and $50 for businesses and apartment buildings. "SPU doesn’t expect to collect many fines, says Tim Croll, the agency’s solid-waste director. The city outlawed recyclable items from the trash nine years ago, but SPU has collected less than $2,000 in fines since then, Croll says. 'The point isn’t to raise revenue,' he said. 'We care more about reminding people to separate their materials.'"
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Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food More

Seattle Passes Laws To Keep Residents From Wasting Food

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  • Even for the samzenpus failure machine [slashdot.org], this article is terrible. In this case, the headline is a complete fabrication that does not reflect the reality of the article it links to or the ordinance passed by Seattle City Council. Sure, samzenpus is a hacktacular idiot who has many times before posted various rallying calls for conservatives to come have a circle-jerk here at slashdot, but this is even terrible for him. Will his next posting to the front page be about the "latte salute" from Obama?

    Samz

    • Re:Another terrible article courtesy of samzenpus (Score:5, Interesting)

      by halivar ( 535827 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `reglefb'> on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @01:50PM (#47986371)

      I read the article, and am having a hard time seeing where the summary is incorrect.

      • Re:Another terrible article courtesy of samzenpus (Score:5, Interesting)

        by AcidPenguin9873 ( 911493 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @02:03PM (#47986545)

        Seattle has not made it a fine-worthy offense to discard uneaten eat food, which is what the headline implies. Seattle residents are instead supposed to throw both uneaten food and the remnants of mostly-eaten food - as much of it as they want - into their composting bin, not the "regular" trash. The goal was to get people to compost compostable items (like food) instead of throw them into the trash. Not to prevent discarding uneaten food.

        I suppose since compost is later turned into fertilizer, composting is a bit less truly wasteful than throwing uneaten food into the "regular" trash, but I doubt that distinction is meaningful since in either case the food is no longer edible.

        • I suppose since compost is later turned into fertilizer, composting is a bit less truly wasteful than throwing uneaten food into the "regular" trash, but I doubt that distinction is meaningful since in either case the food is no longer edible.

          The only "meaning" it has is to their particular recycling and waste disposal programs. As you say, this is not about waste at all. It is only about where to put different kinds of trash.

          It would be very similar to an ordinance that fines people for putting glass in the aluminum recycle bin.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Ichijo ( 607641 )

          Seattle has not made it a fine-worthy offense to discard uneaten eat food, which is what the headline implies.

          What definition of "waste" are you using that's synonymous with "discard"?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tiberus ( 258517 )
        Okay, so apparently I'm the only one that was left confused after reading the headline, which gave me a Detective Thorn ala Soylent Green flashback, and the summary, after-which I had that look dogs get when they're confused...

    • Please people, before you mod damn_registrars up, take a look at his comments. He's just harassing samzenpus.

      This article certainly is about wasting food.

      Landfill - a place to dispose of refuse and other waste material by burying it and covering it over with soil, especially as a method of filling in or extending usable land.

      If you put extra food in a landfill it becomes waste.
      If you put extra food into a compost bin, it becomes fertilizer.
      If you are putting extra food into the landfill you get a ticket.
      The

      • For everyone other than people trying to argue semantics on Slashdot, "wasting food" means discarding it uneaten. The fact that uneaten food that is discarded into a compost bin will be turned into fertilizer does not mean it was not wasted.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by thaylin ( 555395 )
        You are intentionally misrepresenting definitions., No matter where you put food you throw away it is food waste, no matter where you put it into the ground it also becomes fertilizer. If you are in the UK you may be able to get away with verbing a word like that to mean something it does not here in the US. Wasting food in the US means to throw it away rather then to eat it.

      • Please people, before you mod damn_registrars up, take a look at his comments. He's just harassing samzenpus.

        I agree that damn-registrars is being over the top; but I have to say when I read the headline and then read TFS I did a double-take - the two do not jibe.

        "Wasting food" is almost universally understood to mean that the food is being used for some other purpose than that of sustaining sentient life. It's NOT generally understood as specifically being 'put into the garbage bin' as opposed to being 'put into the compost bin' - I'm pretty sure most people view either of these fates for food as 'waste'. If I l

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      You have this backwards. Samzenpus thinks this is a great idea. He if far more MSNBC than FOXNews material.

  • Why does the headline pretend that it does? Didn't the person who posted this bother to read the article before passing it through to the front page?

    And what does it have to do with technology?

    • Re:This has nothing to do with wasting food (Score:5, Insightful)

      by QuietLagoon ( 813062 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @01:51PM (#47986379)

      ...And what does it have to do with technology?

      I've been noticing a trend in many of the articles that make it to the front page here. The trend is towards more inflammatory political-oriented articles that have little or only a marginal relation to technology.

      .
      Maybe after the failed site redesign, the new owners are trying to increase page hits by turning /. into a drudge-like site with lots of misleading headlines.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 )

        Maybe after the failed site redesign, the new owners are trying to increase page hits by turning /. into a drudge-like site with lots of misleading headlines.

        I don't think that's a "maybe"

        The choice of what crap makes it through the submission process is amazing at times.

      • I'm happy when there's a good discussion of huge political issues here on /. -- I remember reading on 9/11/2001 and recently when we decided to bomb another country in the Middle East and enjoying the information and perspective this community brings. I would even argue having more of it is better. However, those are stories which are important and warrant attention from everyone -- regardless of which OS is your favorite (i.e. "Stuff that Matters"). It's good to hear from a self-moderated community rath

      • Honestly, I think it's because those of us who submit actual scientific/geeky/nerdy articles gave up trying to make decent headlines/summaries after the 100+th one failed to get greenlit. Folks start doing more and more to get something to get folks attention with their articles.
      • More controversy = more ad revenue. Dice doesn't care a whit what you think or how many mod points you have or what your karma has. You are a means to an end. The more controversy they feed you, the more likely you are to read or post and the more ads you are served.
        No different from TV "news". Misleading flamebait to get you to watch the 10 o'clock news where you find out their big story for the day was a hyped up non-event. But they got viewers and they get dollars for it.

    • And what does it have to do with technology?

      Regardless of your take on how the editor wrote the headline, the concept here (the government empowering trash collectors to police your behavior after looking through what you throw out) is right there in keeping with the government doing all sorts of other things that involve prying into your behavior with an eye towards controlling it. Technology is the most common or at least a highly visible venue for that sort of intrusion these days, so other blatant examples of government micromanagement (like loo

  • I really thought that was *my* bin I was dumping all that waste food into.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by i kan reed ( 749298 )

      And then immediately asking your city to take away for you, to a landfill, that they have to not only manage and use the space for, but be responsible for the environmentla stewardship of for decades afterwards.

      You buy and safely manage your own private dump, and then you can throw as much compost out as you want.

  • This is Seattle (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Coffee grinds alone probably make up 10%

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • ... sales of commercial-grade garbage disposal units are rising.

    I suppose the Seattle garbage Nazis will pay people to inspect what flows out of my sewer pipe next.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by swb ( 14022 )

      I'm surprised they haven't banned garbage disposals. Pretty much all our food waste with the exception of meat bones goes into the disposal.

      Here in Minneapolis we used to have pre-sort recycling where you had to separate out all the recyclables by type. In the past year they went to single sort and participation soared. I'm kind of curious if anyone's studied the impact of flawed but high participation rate recycling versus more perfect but low participation rate recycling.

  • The carrot instead of the stick of the law should be tried first: offer rewards for reporting rather than spankings for not. Laws like this just clog up police departments and courts, and probably increase insurance rates for trash collection companies.

    • And yet if you read the article it doesn't. The same thing was applied to recyclables. People disposed of their recyclables properly and weren't fined. Too bad it doesn't help your narrative.

  • Maybe they could streamline the whole process and have members of the public be required to serve on sorting duty at the dumps, kind of like jury duty. I mean it's for the environment so who cares that it's at the behest of a for profit company?

  • From the article:

    "The council vote to pass the new composting measure was a unanimous 9-to-0. No public hearing was required."

  • He kept passing laws to stop New Yorkers from eating food, (with a more fluid definitions of "food" and "eat" of course. :-)

  • Weight or volume? (Score:3)

    by CrimsonAvenger ( 580665 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @02:21PM (#47986763)

    So, is the 10% limit by weight or volume?

    And how are the trash collectors supposed to determine whether it's 9% or 11%?

    Oh, and are they going to be opening plastic garbage bags to check the contents? Or are plastic garbage bags already illegal in Seattle?

    • By the time the bag of garbage is offered as evidence in court, the compostable portion will likely have shrunk to below 10% by volume.

  • Legit Effort (Score:3)

    by retroworks ( 652802 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @02:30PM (#47986869) Homepage Journal

    I'm a pretty big critic of fellow environmentalists who get carried away with authority, sometimes actually doing environmental harm in the pursuit of theory (e.g. ROHS, removal of recycled content lead from circuit boards, replaced with tin mined from Indonesian coral islands, oy vey. Like replacing plastic with "organic, natural" baby seal pelts).

    However, in defense of the enviros and the article posted on /., organic waste really is a pretty cutting edge activity. A century ago pig farmers actually collected significant amounts of food waste, and until very recently the Egyptian Zabaleen community (Coptic Christians) ran a hugely successful organic waste collection system in Cairo. It was a fairly recent innovation to put recyclables and organics and junk into "landfills" and incinerators. It's legitimate to study public policy and efforts to achieve more sustainable cities.

    When I was in charge of a state recycling program in the 90s (MA DEP), however, I found that rewarding positive behavior got better publicity than "fines" for not recycling. We ran a "recycling lottery" in Somerville where they'd choose a household at random and if they had their recyclables out, they got $200. It generated the awareness the Seattle fine is trying to achieve without the Drudge-Report-iness. It's also easier to backtrack if the whole thing turns out to be a mistake, if you've given out prizes for affirmative behavior instead of fines.

    • Fun fact, all MGM owned casinos in Las Vegas donate 100% of their food scraps to a local pig farmer, who in turn has very fat healthy pigs. Those pigs are then sold at a great discount to MGM owned casinos in Las Vegas. It's a fantastic system.

  • I always find it kind of weird that people who live in cities expect the government to collect the trash to begin with.

    • They pay them money to do that

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PPH ( 736903 )

      Living out in the suburbs, in an area recently annexed by a local town, collection became mandatory. I was happy with hauling it myself, which I have done for decades. But when organized crime^H^H^Hcommercial collection services told the city they could tack a utility tax onto the fee, they were all in.

  • Single stream is more efficient. Dump most stuff and split it up at the far end.

  • I already compost all of my food waste, most of which goes into my garden. What little there is, anyway. I spent too many years nearly starving, so usually when we cook (which is about 98% of what we eat) it goes through 3 cycles of leftover re-hashes until it's all gone. What can't be used immediately gets frozen and used later. My wife and I live on 60$ a week for groceries, which includes all toiletries, paper products, and cleaning goods. Learn to compost and make use of your food intelligently and resp

  • Food can sit in a garbage can for a week before they come by.

    How do they tell the difference between wasted food and food that was thrown out because it was spoiled and unsafe to eat to start with?

  • 100s of train cars, every day (Score:5, Informative)

    by thatseattleguy ( 897282 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @03:00PM (#47987197) Homepage
    A vital detail that those outside the city (and many within it) don't know - and of course won't get from the inflammatory OMG! NANNY STATE! headline/summary - is that the City of Seattle doesn't have a local landfill. Hasn't for many years; there's no nearby space. Instead, all garbage is loaded onto train cars - hundreds of them a day - and sent by rail to a landfill in rural Oregon, about 250 miles away. That was the cheapest alternative for the city, even though it involves paying twice (once to transport it, and again to the landfill operator). But it's still expensive.
    .
    Given that it's in the best interest of the City _and_ its ratepayers to reduce the amount of landfillable waste (aka number of train cars) in favor of more economic alternatives; specifically, recycling and composting, both of which are able to be handled within a few dozen miles of the city, at much lower cost than the landfill trains. The alternative is to have even more and longer trains and higher rates for garbage for everyone.
    .
    Kind of the opposite of a nanny state; this is pure and simple economics. If the spectre of a few $1 fines for the few residents who can't be bothered to separate their greasy pizza boxes into another bin makes everyone's garbage rates lower, then I'm all for it.
  • That isn't even the dumbest thing Seattle did this week.

  • The headline is misleading. . . (Score:3)

    by Mr_Wisenheimer ( 3534031 ) on Wednesday September 24, 2014 @05:57PM (#47988933)

    . . . it seems the law is not intended to go after residents who "waste food." It is intended to go after residents who put significant amounts of food into the trash bin instead of the food/yard waste bin, the same way it already went after people who were throwing away large amounts of recyclable glasses or cans.

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