If you are of a certain age, you may recall the lyrics of a famous song by perhaps the most famous band of all time, The Beatles. When these lads were in their 20s they generated quite a few hit songs, many with powerful and touching lyrics. One of their more lighthearted tunes was titled “When I’m 64,” and asked the burning question, “will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m 64,” as they mocked that seemingly distant and ancient age. As it turns out, the lads from Liverpool were wrong, and turning 64 is still darn young, daggumit. I’m not ready to be a grumpy old man yet. I mention this for no particular reason on this Ides of March.

Which, of course, brings me to the issue of garbage collection in Denver and elsewhere…

A recent Colorado Politics story noted that Denver is considering altering the way in which the city collects trash from roughly 180,000 households. Denver, it seems, is underperforming the national average in terms of how much recyclable trash is getting removed from the solid-waste stream and is instead going into recycling facilities. In an effort to help improve that statistic, the city is proposing to collect recycling every week – rather than the current every two weeks – as well as compost, for free, and then would charge residents a monthly fee for the actual trash collection, with the fee based on the size of the trash container used. I think this is a good idea, but I think there might be a better one out there.

When I read this story, my thoughts turned back to the late 1990s when I was studying for my Ph.D. at the University of Michigan. The Air Force Academy Department of Political Science had sent me to grad school (before returning to teach at the Academy) and I have to say, that’s about the best job there is: getting paid your regular salary to go to school. As my late first wife’s parents lived in the small town of Fenton, about 45 minutes north of the University’s home of Ann Arbor, we elected to buy a house in Fenton for the three years I would be in school there.

The city of Fenton was, and is still, a lovely small town with nice people and an epic candy store named Sweet Variations. And the city there did something that perhaps Denver and other Colorado cities (cough… Colorado Springs… cough…) might consider adopting, regarding trash and recycling collections.

Here in Colorado Springs, I pay my HOA a quarterly fee that includes trash collection. I pay an additional fee to also have my recycling collected. The civic leaders in Fenton realized back in the 1990s that that fee structure had things backward. If the goal is to support recycling, the fee structure should support that goal.

In Fenton, you could put as many trash cans as you wanted out on the curb. But unlike most places (including my current home) Fenton charged for the trash and collected your recycling for free. Every trash can had to have a “trash ticket” attached to it in order for the workers to collect the trash. The workers would rip the tag off the can and then collect the contents. No tag, no collection.

You could buy those tickets for a dollar each at any of the city’s grocery stores or at city hall or a few other locations. But since nearly everyone shops for groceries, that is where most people bought their trash tickets. So, you could ignore recycling if you wanted to and you could put out, say, twenty trash cans every week, again, if you wanted to. But each of those cans would need a ticket (they had nice wires for easy attachment to the can’s lid).

The idea was to incentivize the use of recycling, by charging for trash collection based on how much you put out on the curb. The more you could put in the free recycling bin, the lower your weekly trash costs.

Denver’s proposed system will be a bit different, with monthly fees based on standard can sizes, but they might want to consider the wisdom of the city leaders in Fenton. It’s been years since I was last in Fenton, and I admit I’m not sure if Fenton is still doing things that same way, but in a large city like Denver I can really see value in tapping into market forces and capitalism to increase the use of recycling by residents. The new plan is a step in the right direction, but perhaps there might be a tweak or two that could prove useful.

Now if you will excuse me, I need to go complain about those darn kids on my lawn…

(Hey, I guess I am a grumpy old man after all…)

 Hal Bidlack is a retired professor of political science and a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who taught more than 17 years at the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs.