By W.L. Rathje

Remember Reading Railroad from the game of"Monopoly?" It was always my favorite acquisition in my unrelenting struggle to drive opponents into bankruptcy.

Last Earth Day I visited Reading, PA, the town that gave the railroad its name. Imagine my chagrin when I learned that all these years my Midwest friends and I had been mispronouncing its name. It may be spelled like something you are doing right now—"reading"—but it is pronounced "red´ing," as in the color red.

That is irony with just a twist that’s not exactly what you would expect. In Reading, PA, ironies with a twist are what I soon came to anticipate. As we prepare to carry our refuse dilemmas across the threshold into the next millennium, Reading’s ironic and slightly twisted mix of garbage lessons might be worth reading.

How many garbage haulers would you think it takes to pick up the discards from Reading’s 29,326 residential units? To be precise—30! In fact, in this day of acquisitions and centralization in the trash trade, Reading might be considered for a Guinness Record for the highest ratio of garbage hauling companies to garbage generators in the US. Reading’s ratio is about 1:1,000; in Tucson, AZ, and its environs, the ratio is 1:26,000—26 times higher!

This means that the trucks of several different small, and not so small, trash haulers are forever traipsing up and down the same Reading streets. This might be a model of independence that exemplifies the entrepreneurial Yankee spirit, but it is not a model of efficiency.

Another consuming Yankee passion—that of trying to save a few bucks—complicates matters further as some people squeeze themselves through the cracks of Reading's rather unsystematic lattice of garbage collection. Since Reading itself is not responsible for household trash pickup, individual citizens are. With the welter of haulers coming and going virtually every day, it is relatively easy for, say, a nonresident owner of a small number of rental units to take garbage into his or her own hands or even for very small haulers to improve their competitive edge by tipping where there are no fees.

Voilá! Another Reading garbage irony—so many garbage haulers to carry refuse away and so much refuse left behind as litter or illegal dumps!

Sadly, the tracks of Conrail (what's left of the old Reading Railroad and more) have become a "trash magnet." That's dangerous since large unwanted items can damage breaks and block signals. Recently, railroad workers filled six railcars with 450 tons of debris in just 10 months. Conrail has done what it can to deter inappropriate dumping with chainlink fencing, but as an editorial in the Reading Eagle/Reading Times reported, "People cut through the fences. That’s determination."

The habit of wanton dumping also clutters the town's center of business. In response, Reading’s DID—Downtown Improvement District—first hired a private company to clean up litter. When expenses seemed prohibitive, the DID arranged for nine unpaid inmates of Berks County Prison to do the dirty work. The largest problem to date is that the sheriff wants the inmates identified as prisoners, but the DID Board doesn’t want them to look like a chain gang.

But the property blighted is not just corporate or public. In fact, if nothing else, Reading's litterbugs are thorough, and the homes and lots of all too many private citizens continually fall prey to "drive-by dumpings." Those victims inclined to a little hands-on garbology have often found a pay stub, a piece of junk mail, or even receipts (oops!) tucked among the soiled diapers and gunky pizza boxes. While valuable in tracking the trash to its dumper, it hasn’t provided the dumpee with much "closure." All that the perpetrator household has to do is claim that a private hauler had been hired. Even if that hauler is not directly named, charges have usually been dismissed.

The local government of Reading is responding to this undesirable state of affairs as best as it can. currently, the person whose trash is illegally dumped is held responsible unless he or she names a specific hauler who was hired to pick it up for disposal.

In another move, the Reading City Council devised a plan to divide the city into four districts and put refuse collection in each one up for competitive bids. Reading’s voters, however, probably in sympathy with the smaller "underdog" haulers—another Yankee trait—defeated this plan for systematic citywide refuse collection by voting down a referendum in May 1998.

The city council responded by retrenching and emerging with a new ordinance that required nonresident owners of four or fewer rental units (the profile that fits an inordinate number of those caught illegally depositing trash) to participate in a city-managed collection system. In addition, any property owner convicted of three or more trash violations in one year would also be compelled to join the city system for two years. Other Reading residents could voluntarily participate, which, at least by city calculations, would be cheaper than hiring a "private" hauler. The city plan would place 500 litter baskets throughout the community and pay its refuse-collection contractor to expunge debris from properties that owners didn’t clean up themselves after being cited for a trash violation. Employing a more recent Yankee tradition, the trash haulers are suing to stop the implementation of the ordinance.

In this age of merger-mania and efficiency at any cost, Reading, PA, sticks out like a sore piece of litter, one where unsystematic refuse collection leads to lots of unsightly refuse leaks.

But—yes, ironically—the seeming chaos in discards leads to something else as well. Reading’s citywide curbside recycling program is the most productive in the entire state. Each year J.P. Mascaro & Sons, the city's curbside contractor, collects a whopping 360-plus tons of recyclables—30% more than the rate in Tucson.

Why is a city with a significant litter problem a model recycler? Not surprisingly, the answer seems to be time and money: the more a Readingite recycles, the less he or she has to dispose of by some other means, either legitimate or nefarious.

Does this mean that messier is better?

Ask any resident with the least bit of community pride, and they'll tell you, "No, we want to be free of litter." Nonetheless, the Reading situation does add support to the "Pay-As-You-Throw" concept: People recycle more if they have to pay to get rid of their garbage but don’t have to pay for the collection of recyclables curbside.

And those who are more than tempted to litter and illegally dump—ah, well, to every Reading solution, there’s a twist!

MSW
January /February 2000