That’s what this is really about. From the Seattle Times:

All single-family homes in Seattle must sign up for table-scrap recycling in 2009, the City Council decided Monday.

While residents will have to pay for the service, the city will not check whether they are actually dumping food in the new separate bin.

Reducing food trash was a piece of a larger plan the council unanimously approved Monday to reduce the amount of garbage sent to the landfill.

“We can reduce the waste stream,” said Councilmember Richard Conlin, chair of the utilities committee. “We can treat waste as a resource and continue to recirculate it as we reclaim, recycle it or turn it into compost.”

Starting in April 2009, all single-family homes will be required to subscribe to food-waste recycling, a program that is now optional through the yard-waste collection program. A variety of containers will be available for different rates. Prices have not been set.

Recycling food waste will be voluntary for apartments, as well as for businesses, which produce twice as much food waste as residents.

…

In another effort to reduce landfill waste, the council wants to raise self-haul rates at the transfer station in 2008, and eventually eliminate the do-it-yourself trips to the transfer stations.

The council declined to ban Styrofoam and plastic garbage bags. For now, SPU will study a ban and plastic-bag tax and report back to the council by the end of this year.

It isn’t about reducing the waste stream as Seattle City Councilmember Richard Conlin contends. If it were then the city would actually check whether people were complying.

While residents will have to pay for the service, the city will not check whether they are actually dumping food in the new separate bin.

If this were truly about reducing the amount of food waste that goes into landfills then it would not be voluntary for the organizations that produce twice as much food waste as private residents.

Recycling food waste will be voluntary for apartments, as well as for businesses, which produce twice as much food waste as residents.

It’s about fees, cleverly disguised as environmental concern. It’s the nanny state run amok, forcing single-family home owners to pay additional fees to support apartment dwellers. Single-family home owners that produce less than a third of the supposed “problem”. More socialist redistributionist oppression disguised as environmentalism is not what’s needed.

Reducing landfill waste is the stated goal, and there may be some small reduction as a result of all of this, but the city council’s true motives are transparent. It’s all about more money. Raising self-hauling rates at the transfer station is an effort to reduce the amount of self-hauling. Which means more curbside trash, with extra fees for the extra cans. It’s all about money.

Eliminating self-haul trips to the transfer station also means that more trash will sit rotting at the curbside in case of sanitation worker strikes. The same amount of garbage will be created, perhaps even more as the population rises. Landfills will still get filled with garbage.

The only real benefit here is to the city, which gets more revenue. They’re even planning to tax plastic bags… I guess more trees will have to die to supply the paper for the replacements. Once upon a time, using plastic bags was thought to be friendlier to the environment than paper for just that reason.

This measure is sure to be popular in Seattle though. After all, it’s cloaked in the aura of environmentalism. It’s “good for you” to recycle.

I’m waiting for the cloud of flies feeding off of all of those recycled table scraps.

Originally posted at Perri Nelson’s Website.