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Friday, March 29
The Indiana Daily Student

​City asks residents to choose carts for new trash collection

Region Filler

This fall, the city will fully implement its new trash collection system, eliminating the current trash sticker system with which residents are familiar.

Residents have until June 18 to choose the sizes of carts they prefer to use with the new system, the city announced Monday.

With the new system, residents using city trash collection will receive one cart each for trash and recycling. By default, residents will receive 64-gallon carts for both. By the city’s estimate, this cart is enough to hold six standard kitchen trash bags.

Until June 18, residents may use either the city’s website or forms that were distributed to mailboxes to request one of two other cart options, a smaller 35-gallon cart for as few as three trash bags, or a larger 96 gallon cart to hold up to ten.

To help residents in deciding if a particular size is best for them, carts of each size will be on display in the atrium of City Hall through the middle of June, according to a city of Bloomington press release.

As opposed to the current sticker system, residents will be a charged a monthly fee for their use of the carts.

This fee will vary based on the size of cart they choose.

Monthly fees have yet to be precisely decided. The fee for the default, mid-sized cart will be between $8.60 and $11.61, with the exact fee to be decided in a July 25 meeting of the Board of Public Works, after the deadline for choosing cart sizes.

A monthly fee of between $4.82 and $6.51 will be charged for the smaller cart, and between $13.72 and $18.52 for the larger cart.

The carts are part of Bloomington’s modernization of its waste collection service, approved by the Bloomington Common Council in March.

In addition to the new carts, the city will purchase new sanitation trucks and begin using radio frequency identification chips within the carts to track and optimize usage.

The new system will mean that sanitation 
workers will not need to manually load trash into the trucks, a practice which has caused injuries costing the city $89,000 from 2013 to 2015, according to director of Public Works Adam Wason in March.

Residents should expect delivery of their carts this fall shortly ahead of full implementation of the new system, according to Monday’s release.

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