The Cellar - May 30th, 2015: The Trashman Cometh

Many places in the US, have private trash collection. Some places you have a choice of hiring a private contractor or taking your trash to the dump/Transfer Station, yourself. Then there are places like where I live, that stick it to me by forcing me to hire a trash company, by not allowing me to take it myself. AND make it illegal for me to take it out of the county because of a sweetheart deal with the trash to steam plant in Chester. They burn trash to make electricity and when they run short of trash they burn plastic and paper collected in the county recycle program.

In Middlebury, VT, there's private trash collection with an additional option... Pete and Moe.

http://cellar.org/2015/trashman.jpg

Quote:

For some people in Middlebury the sound of garbage collection has gone from the sound of truck motors to a different kind of horsepower. Nick Hammond and his team of horses, Pete and Moe, just started their new trash pickup business two months ago. "We went door to door at first for a while handing out fliers and just trying to spark some interest, and had a lot of positive feedback," Hammond said.

He got the idea from his friend, Pat Palmer, who has been doing similar work in Bristol for 18 years. Palmer agreed to help Hammond get his business going. Amanda Morse is also a business partner.

So far, the company has 60-70 clients. Trash pickups are on Mondays and Tuesdays. Hammond trailers his horses to Middlebury from his farm in Shoreham to get the job done. They charge $5 a bag for trash pickup; recycling is free. They average about 40-50 bags of trash each day.

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