Trash

WHEN IS A tax not a tax? When you call it a "fee" for trash pickup. We may be getting hit by $5 a week per house to help pay for a deficit created by those who were supposed to lead us by making good decisions, but it turns out those decisions weren't so good after all. It's time to privatize. If I'm going to pay for the services, let me pick the company that will get me the biggest bang for my buck. Next, it'll be $5 a week to clean my street. Oh, wait, that hasn't happened in years.

To Veronica Joyner, the problem is simple. "I've got a whole slew of trash, and a city that refuses to pick it up," said Joyner, executive director of I Made a Choice Inc. Then the Department of Streets accommodated her - "once and one time only," Joyner said. She's been trying to convince the Department of Licenses and Inspections that they owe her the service - for free. "We've been doing things like clean and seal abandoned houses with L&I," she said. "We never get paid.

Recycling has been expanded for residents of Upper Merion Township, but those who toss out too much non-recyclable trash will face extra charges. Effective April 1, Browning-Ferris Industries (BFI), which provides private trash collection for most of the township's more than 25,000 residents, will add colored glass, metal cans other than aluminum, and plastic -like milk jugs and detergent and soda bottles - to their list of recyclables. The expanded recycling will not increase the $20-a-month cost of garbage pickup, but the number of trash bags or cans that can be put out has been reduced from 10 to three for each of the two weekly pickups.

Aldan Borough Council members voiced concern at their caucus meeting last week about non-compliance with the borough's trash-disposal ordinance. According to a police activity report given at the borough caucus meeting Wednesday, 23 citations have been issued to residents who failed to properly contain their garbage or who had left it out long after the designated pick-up time. Twenty of the citations were issued for violations by apartment dwellers on Maryland Avenue. The council last month sent a letter to residents urging them to comply with the trash-disposal ordinance.

West Marlborough's trash has become a desirable commodity. Roger Legg, solicitor for the Southeastern Chester County Refuse Authority, told local officials Tuesday that the county may require the township to send its waste to SECCRA's principal competitor, the Lanchester Landfill in Honey Brook. That's a requirement Legg wants to avoid. Legg asked the Board of Supervisors to conduct a special meeting on March 20 to settle the matter. "Chester County is on the verge of passing a flow-control ordinance, and we're suspicious some communities will be required to go to Lanchester," Legg said.

Easter 1986, in sizable swatches of Center City at least, may be remembered not so much for its sparkling sunshine and bursting buds - and, thank goodness, the absence of a melee on Chestnut Street - as for the lingering bouquet of uncollected curbside trash. So it is becoming at holiday time in Philadelphia: A moment of joy and then a week-long hangover of overstuffed trash bins, boxes and splitting green bags. The city's business leaders thought the mess so abysmal this time that they accused municipal sanitation workers of a slowdown.

Distressed that the city apparently is ignoring a spreading mound of trash in their midst, residents of a small area of South Philadelphia asked the Daily News yesterday to help find out the cause for the lack of interest. Fifty feet long, 10 feet wide and more than 6 feet high in some spots, the mound clings to the side of an abandoned rowhouse at 15th and Clymer streets like some malformed urban lamprey. The heap includes old rugs, furniture, appliances, clothes, wood, weeds, cardboard, food wrappers, beer cans and wine bottles, debris thrown onto the sidewalk and narrow Clymer Street on Aug. 1 by workers who had been hired to clean out the three-story house, neighbors say. "Why is the city . . . not doing their job in cleaning it up?"

Norristown Borough Manager John Plonski doesn't have to go far to discover that people are dumping all sorts of trash and rubbish in his Montgomery County community. He just looks out the window of his Borough Hall office. "There's a big parking lot behind the building. We occasionally see things thrown there - sofas and TVs. And I've seen some old tires, and some cardboard boxes. We even get an abandoned car in our parking lot once in a while," Plonski said. But, he added, the nighttime dumping is done all over town.

The devil is in the details. And if the gods of recycling look down on the remains of this Republican National Convention, they will see this: The big stuff - tents, carpets, plywood - will largely be put to use again in other places. But the city made no effort to recycle cans and newspapers as it asked Philadelphia residents to do at home. "We did not recycle down there," said city Managing Director Joseph Martz. ". . .The city did not put a recycling truck down there like it put a trash compactor down there.

This is in response to Mark Jaffe's June 29 Review & Opinion piece on safety questions about trash burning. I believe the public must be told of the virtues as well as the potential problems of incineration of waste materials. Yes, there are problems, but they have been addressed successfully. Within a 15-minute drive of The Inquirer's offices, a patented incineration system is in operation. The system has completed test burns for the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, with emissions measured at approximately one-third the levels permitted by the agency.