Many of us have Professional Gardening services. Therefore, we have no need for a Yard Trimmngs Cart, What is your solution for all of these people? Make us pay more to get one? Then reduce pickup to once every other week for my trash? And boldly tell the public that there is only an upside and will only cost a bit more?

Why are we doing this abomination again?

I, for one, have been waiting for this program to be provided for a long time, and I strongly hope Council will approve one of the options tonight. Far too much food waste goes to landfill today, and this program is necessary to address the problem.

As long as costs go down w/ bi-weekly pick up by 40-50% I may be interested in hearing about it.
If costs would not go down that much, we're being RIPPED OFF!

To concerned neighbor
Many of us have professional gardeners that use are yard bins. Just to let you know.

It is simple to put food waste down the disposal. Don't most people have one? Why mess up garbage collection for that?

"Garbage Disposal": because food waste shouldn't go down the disposal. Cities are mandated to pursue "zero waste", which means either diverting stuff out of the waste stream or preventing stuff from being disposed of in the first place. The point of food collection is that it can then be directly diverted to composting, turned into animal feed, converted to energy in anaerobic digesters, or whatever causes it to be reused and not just dumped in landfill. When you put food down the disposal, it doesn't enter the solid waste stream - it instead enters the sewer system, where it must then be physically and chemically stripped out of the water (by law) before the water can be used as recycled water or put into the bay. Garbage disposals may be handy, but they're the worst possible way to dispose of solid waste.

They tried this in our neighborhood. It's ridiculous to leave our other garbage sitting for two weeks. We share garbage cans with other renters who can't seem to get stuff in the correct containers. Every time a new person moves into the building, it's a mess. If we complain to the city, they send out a garbage Nazi, who blames us because there's one can in with the garbage instead of the recycle. Stuff with food accidentally still goes in the regular garbage or is inappropriate for compost, or dead animal carcasses, but sits for two weeks, attracting rats and other vermin.

If you have home care help, you're paying them by the hour to gift wrap garbage for the city. If you have diapers of any sort, it's disgusting to leave them laying around for two weeks.

This program can easily be voluntary and would be as effective, since anyone can put food scraps with compost.

Reducing garbage pick up to only once every two weeks results in increased rats, maggots and flies. There is a reason standard garbage pick up is weekly; it's because weekly pick up is necessary.

This from someone who is extremely environmentally conscientious. I love the idea of composting, but I seriously need my garbage picked up every week and don't want to have to pay extra, don't have space for extra garbage cans. All this program does is make life difficult and I'm not interested in gift wrapping my garbage.

How much less would we pay? No less. It costs the same. If you still need garbage picked up, you have to pay for addition cans (and store them) or pay for an extra pick up.

Of course they aren't passing any savings on to residents. Why would they when they can use an environmental program to increase profits? This would lower landfill costs At the very least.

Simple way to reduce food waste is to buy less food. Less food = less waste = less food scraps to dispose of.

Buy what you can eat without leftovers and be imaginative with leftovers if you do have some extra from these Costco sized bulk buys.

Less wastage at mealtimes and you won't have a problem of scraps to dispose of.

Only in America do we throw away so much food!

What it boils down to is what It's Ridiculous said, garbage can't sit around for two weeks. It needs to be weekly.

This idea akin to holding residents by their ankles over a barrel and shaking them until their last money falls out. All so the garbage company can increase profits.
The council should be PROTECTING the citizens, not toying with ideas that help outside companies FLEECE the residents!

Looks like MV is trying to force people, even families with children, to produce 1/2 as much garbage. That's plain ignorant of the fools in MMountain View govt. Weekly pickup is needed for sanitary reasons --- that's why its weekly. Also, if MV changes it to bi-weekly and keeps the same can size, then I predict that there will be a large increase in illegal dumping in parks and on commercial parking lots.

The rats will decide what the City Council does in the end. I've seen more and more (and bigger) rats running through the neighborhood for the last several years. I almost look forward to the City adopting this asinine idea just to watch the rat shows that follow. We've got the high rises now, we might as well go all the way toward becoming Manhattan View.

There's something funky about the program as originally offered i.e. less service for more costs. And this recycling design really doesn't fit with my processes for managing waste and I suspect that may be true for other households as well. I recycle everything now. I like the current service and am not really served by the suggested changes esp when my costs will go up.

Enough!
Yes rats are in most of Mtn View neighborhoods, I say no to this crazy idea. For 30 plus years we had no problems, now it's unreal with rats. They were taking fruit of the trees this summer and never left. This council needs to stop with all their crazy ideas. New council in January, we hope for the better.

Pee-yew ... what a recipe for disaster. If 'food waste' is really just pizza boxes and food wrappers this wouldn't be too bad but my fear is that 'food waste' is just that - FOOD waste, i.e., meat scraps, fat trimmings, leftovers that weren't eaten in a timely manner, spoiled cottage cheese, etc. Not something I'd want to collect in my garage for two weeks, especially during the hot summer months. For those residents lucky enough to have a nice big backyard in which to collect their food waste, just imagine the rats, mice and raccoons, not to mention the flies that would collect around the waste bin. And as mentioned by someone in an earlier post, those diapers and dog poo bags sitting around in the regular garbage bin for two weeks will just add to the ambiance. What a joy. Let's hope our elected officials show some common sense.

Kudos to the more than 600 residents who signed a petition opposing the proposal to eliminate weekly garbage collection and the dozens who showed up at the City Council meeting last night. The council voted unanimously NOT to eliminate weekly garbage pickups. A number of residents who were part of the pilot program who had their garbage collection picked up every other week also spoke at the meeting against the proposal. This opposition clearly had an impact on the vote.

Less-frequent trash pickup along with foodscraps separation is the long-term recycling trend and will be here inevitably, the question has only been when. That's because it works: it greatly reduces landfill trash and -- with proper options and consumer education -- it poses no hardships to households.

The City's recycling personnel and some City Council members have known all that for a while. Earlier this year, the Council started out predisposed to implement the full program soon. But the city staff determined that enough of the public wasn't yet comfortable with the idea, so they changed tack, proposing the more politically palatable, less-effective form that the Council has apparently found easy to approve.

There's no fundamental nuisance or inconvenience in less-frequent trash pickups IF you do it right and if (also, therefore) you have much less trash to pick up. Some customers in other cities use trash service even less often than every two weeks -- they discover that they want less, not more, trash frequency once they know how to handle it. There are straightforward fixes to all of the complaints (some real, some just fantasy) raised in earlier comments here, once you actually decide to deal with them. But it's all still unfamiliar to Mountain View. The City gov't has a burden to properly demystify the idea and spread more of the practical wisdom from places that have made it work. Some people in the EOW pilot area did have problems (those were the minority you heard from; 2-week trash pick-up worked out fine for the rest, who weren't complaining). Outside the EOW pilot neighborhood, people anxious about losing their familiar weekly trash service, and who didn't know how it would work out (and who didn't greatly value reducing their own landfill production by more than half, on average) rushed to sign a petition that deliberately distorted the EOW trash service option and its pilot results in order to drum up fear.

So we have this weaker interim compromise. With luck, it won't take many years for the full picture of food-scrap diversion (including the solutions to all of those "yes, but" anxieties) to become familiar, and then Mountain View can move forward. Better late than never. There were people just as passionately and emotionally opposed to statewide bottle deposits, and to separating paper and container recyclables, when those concepts too were new and strange.

So, in the future when the city eventually goes to every other week trash collection (which is the ultimate goal here) those who have pets or infants will basically be forced to pay an additional fee (code word for tax) if they are even going to have a chance at having their odoriferous waste picked up weekly, or pay for a larger trash bin. (However, based upon the price for the weekly option that might be available for a tiny percentage of residents, it doesn't look that option wouldever happen down the road, once every other week is eventually implemented.) Evidently those who have pets or infants that generate trash which cannot be diverted, may need to purchase a larger trash cart for an additional 'fee'. Let's call a spade a spade here, you will be taxed for having an infant that uses disposable diapers or a pet that generates waste. (Parents, you could opt for an expensive diaper service..got that kind of cash? Either way it's gonna cost you?) It should be called the infant & pet waste tax, but it will probably be called a 'fee'...wink wink. Like a 'gas guzzler' tax for those with infants or pets. Same concept, really.

I already use a special pet formula baking soda in my individual kitty collection bags and tie them off. I change the litter box every 5 days using a special pet formula baking soda mixed in with the kitty litter and tying it off when disposing of it...but regardless of how carefully I treat the pet litter and waste, the trash REEKS on collection day every week. Honestly, I don't think it will bother ME much if it sits for two weeks however, the orientation of my residence is such that the trash carts sit along my side fence, which happens to be about 6' from my neighbors bedroom window...so THEY might not appreciate the stench as that 2nd week rolls around. Perhaps if I start cultivating a couple of pot plants that would cover up the stench of the rotting pet feces. ;)

Mountain View isn't the only city to reject every other week (EOW)...Seattle did the same after running a pilot program in four neighborhoods and found customers in their pilot "complained about overflowing cans, more litter in the streets, and more pests and rodents...and more contamination of recycling and compost bins as people looked for other places to dump uncollected trash." (Seattle Times, Feb 2014). Ann Arbor rejected an EOW component in its pilot food scrap program after reading about what happened in Portland's EOW program - 120 pounds of diapers per day when Portland went to EOW. You won't see that in any of the information that Portland puts out on its EOW program...investigative media reporting disclosed the problem. Other cities are backing away from this "new idea" as well. If people get involved and learn about the problems that families and their communities experience with this every other weekly pickup, policy makers will listen, as the city council showed last night.

The rats are so bad and big in Mountain View now and the city does nothing about it.

Rats have actually eaten through the tops of my recycling bins (twice in one year, to get to the trash. They've got to have pretty bid jaws and teeth to do what they've done. Each time they make holes larger than the size of soda cans.

Clarity: No, "those who have pets or infants" will not for those reasons "be forced to pay an additional fee" -- as I mentioned above, dealing with waste of those kinds is among the problems that they have figured out how to handle better, in the many other cities already accustomed to this service. The city recycling manager's most recent report to the Council added that when more frequent trash collection is offered as an option in those places, it is little used (like 1%).

On the other hand, people who do fundamentally produce more trash need larger-volume pickup -- it's true even today, with current weekly trash service and no foodscraps collection -- and pay more, for the service that they're using more of. Only fair.

A closed-mindedness that refuses to look beyond its current, limited awareness of how less-frequent trash collection can work smoothly will probably continue until people get more experience with food-scraps diversion and the city does a better job of communicating helpful tips about it. Diapers are no longer a problem even in Portland, for example. ALL of this played out before, when recycing itself was new and strange, and the same kinds of voices raised every scary scenario they could come up with, to demonize the idea. (I even remember an industry group proclaiming in dead seriousness during late Cold-War days that returnable container laws, which Oregon by the way was pioneering at the time, were "if not literally Communist-instigated, then certainly Communist-inspired.")

Today if it's not godless commies, it's scare stories that anyone can dig up online. You can see this process at work in comments like the "Old MV resident's" above, which search for any fragment of negative news they can find, and never report the much larger rest of the story, or about the regions happy with less-frequent trash pick-up, or its increasing overall use. They don't want to know about that part of reality, because they don't like it. And they throw out self-congratulating rhetoric about the City Council "listening" to them when in fact it was city staff that came up with a politically easy compromise to start scraps diversion, while the nay-sayers have time to figure out at their leisure that the sky won't fall and it isn't a Communist plot.

Glad to see a food scraps program that doesn't diminish basic sanitation services (weekly trash pickup). When looking at trash diversion rate, it's important to realize that this program is only for single-family homes -am ever shrinking share of housing units in Mountain View-. To get us closer to a zero-waste goal, the City should move next to deploying a food scraps program for apartments as done in Oakland.

If you read the agenda (it's item #11) and the council report associated with it, they seem to be leaning toward Option #1, which is weekly garbage collection with a 6% rate increase.

Option #2 is every other week with no rate increase and the ability to set out extra garbage bags for free during the first six months.