This is not an official City of Boston website. This is an academic project created by Harvard Kennedy School students.

Recommendations

This page outlines considerations and next steps for Pay-As-You-Throw implementation in Boston. In short, PAYT shows promise, but further study is recommended.

Considerations

• Based on interviews, the revenue from PAYT should be just enough to offset the price the waste management company charges to dispose of the waste (tipping fee).
• PAYT design may differ by district:
• Districts with narrow streets (North End) may not be able to implement city-distributed bins, as trucks that side-load will not have space.
• Districts with wider streets may benefit from city-distributed bins.
• The City of Brockton piloted PAYT for two years before fully implementing it. Boston may benefit from a pilot, perhaps in a specific district, before full implementation.
• Municipalities that have implemented PAYT have anecdotally reported people driving to other non-PAYT municipalities to dispose of their garbage for free.
• Many municipalities' PAYT programs do not bring in enough revenue to offset the cost of recycling.
• PAYT programs can be very unpopular. To avoid public backlash, some municipalities have not raised their annual fee or the prices of receptacles, even though revenue no longer covers the cost of disposal.
• Interviewees reported residents hiding garbage in their recycling bins. Anecdotally, in Malden, recycling collected is 30-40% trash. Bags provide more transparency, but are vulnerable to weather and pests.

Next Steps

• We recommend conducting a difference-in-difference regression (DiD). A DiD would measure the relationship between annual household tonnage and variables that affect trash production, such as whether or not a municipality adopted PAYT and the affects of time. This would allow the city of Boston to understand the impacts of PAYT over time while controlling for additional variables. As of now, our pre- and post-PAYT assessment poses no statistical significance.
• We recommend contacting currently contracted waste management companies to collect data on the recycling contamination rate (tonnage of solid waste that has ended up in recycling) in municipalities that have implemented PAYT. If the tonnage of solid waste in the recycling stream has increased post-PAYT, as some of our interviewees suspect, then PAYT may not be effective in reducing solid waste tonnage disposed.
• We recommend calculating pre- and post-PAYT recycling tonnage in municipalities that have implemented PAYT.
• With the understanding that municipality data is limited, we recommend analyzing the changes in solid waste and recycling tonnage pre- and post-PAYT as it differs by program type (bag, tag, cart, hybrid).
• One limitation of our analysis is the lack of data on total solid waste tonnage disposed in each municipality. We only have access to the tonnage of solid waste disposed by each household that participates in a municipality's trash program (this does not include many large buildings or public trash receptacles). Ideally, we would be able to calculate the change in annual solid waste tonnage per capita before and after PAYT. As of now, we cannot conclude that PAYT reduces total garbage disposed.
• We recommend investigating how PAYT impacts different socioeconomic groups in a given municipality.
• We recommend looking into tiered PAYT programs, such as those that provide subsidized receptacles for certain populations.