Mark Dancy on the effectiveness of a pay-as-you-throw program

I think what we typically do is a full pay-as-you-throw program. We will do what are called overflow, but where it's most effective, every single pound of trash that you throw away, essentially, you're paying for. There are other towns where they'll say you can throw away up to 64 gallons, and then anything above that you'll pay for. And those are less effective. And the ones that do 96 gallon and then they will call themselves pay as you throw. But fundamentally, if you have 96 gallons of trash a week, you're generating a lot of trash. So you're not really being impacted and your behavior isn't changing. So we'll see in communities anywhere from a 10 to 45 percent waste reduction. But if you have a full pay as you throw, you're typically going to end up with 40 to 45 percent waste reduction. What's interesting is that in the U .S., it's primarily smaller to mid -sized towns that do it. But internationally, Zurich has a program and Seoul, South Korea has a program. And they also saw when they initially started their programs, a 40 percent waste reduction, which is, you know, so human behavior around the globe is is really not that different. Once you start charging for things, people react to that. It's not it's it's common sense, but it just. I think the magnitude of the change is pretty shocking to people. One of the other things that we did in our talks with New York was we talked about counterfeiting pay -as -you -throw bags and that a city the size of New York would likely face that challenge. So we developed, again, a QR coding system where if they had an enforcement agent, they could scan the bag, know whether that bag was in the batch or not. then there'd be a second code with a date that would be, they'd be able to verify that that bag was made in our, you know, at a facility that the city had approved.