The Mayor's War on Rats!

[bobobb.livejournal.com]

Apparently my house wasn't the only one to be hit by rats last year....and now the mayor has responded with a rather cool initiative.

http://www.boston.com/yourtown/news/somerville/2013/11/somerville_mayor_declares_war_on_rats.html

"The city is preparing a new program to offer free rodent control for homeowners and aims to launch a uniform residential trash barrel program to help keep rats from eating out of trash cans."

Also apparently looking into rat birth control...

Comments

[rmd.livejournal.com]

Uniform trash barrels? Is this going to be trash bins that look like the recycling carts?

[ron_newman]

and if so, how will we (and the DPW workers) tell them apart?

[cos]

I don't understand. Why would they be made identical to and indistinguishable from recycling bins? That seems far-fetched. It's trivially easy to make the a different color or mark them differently even if they are the same shape and size and material.

[rmd.livejournal.com]

I've usually seen brown or some dark green for trash, vs blue for recycling.

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

I think the word uniform refers to the trash barrels being uniform to each other (eg city issued and meeting a certain standard), not to the trash barrels being uniform to the Recycling barrels. Presumably not blue as others have suggested.

The recycling barrels are Toter Brand, which I find to be the best of what is available at Home Depot or Lowes in terms of quality, not developing holes for the rodents etc.

I already use them for my trash barels. I recently kindly requested a neighbor adopt them too and after he did that the rodent activity went way down at his property.

I just hope they make them 48 gallon version. 32 is too small, leads to a clutter of too many barrels or overflowing barrels and 64 is too big, the lid tends to get distorted and not fit as well, and it is more likely to get damaged in the pickup process and otherwise just too unwieldy in a city environment.. 48 gallon is what the recycling bins are so hopefully that will be true. But last I checked the trash rules had a 32 gallon max size, a rule that is ignored by just about every property.

[avjudge]

I think the 32-gallon limit is because they're handled manually, so the workers have to lift them. They've gotten new automatic trucks for the recycling, and I'd guess they'd have to do the same for the garbage if they went to a bigger bin.

32 may be too small for you, but on a normal week I have only one or 2 grocery-store bags of trash which barely cover the bottom of my 30ish-gallon barrel. I do (to my surprise) regularly fill my recycling bin, so I don't regret its size, but I'd hate to have to have another bin of that size sitting empty in my yard for 4-5 days of every week, with one tiny bag in it for another couple days, and then two bags for one night. I hope if they go for big bins they're not a requirement.

I look around town and marvel at the amount of trash every other household seems to generate in a week!

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

The trash trucks have a device on the truck that will cans if they have a bar, which Toter brands do. Though the recycling trucks have one that will grab it from the sidewalk if they line it up perfectly.

It would be nice if they can find a way to accept people can's if the cans comply. I'm one of the people that has Toter brand cans just like city issued recycling versions. Problem is most people who are not complying will not admit they are not due to pride or other reasons and won't respond well to ticketing, so city used cans might be the only way to go from a PR perspective. If that is the case I'll accept it in order to have my neighbors get in compliance.

[daviscubed.livejournal.com]

Way out here in Medford we have uniform trash & recycling barrels. The trash barrels are smaller than the recycling barrels, which I think are the same size as Somerville's. Recycling comes every two weeks, trash every week. I think if you want more barrels you have to buy them, but it's something I've never came close to needing. If we were a family of four, we'd probably need another barrel, I guess.

[somerfriend.livejournal.com]

Mayor Curtatone said at tonight's Ward 5 resistat meeting the Somerville uniform trash bins would be a little smaller than the recycling bins, he didn't specify a size.

[prospecthillsom.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm. Then how do I get rid of my barrels? Uniform barrels seems nice in theory, but maybe a bit wasteful in the short-term.

[prunesnprisms.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I already own visually identical barrels to the recycling bins, although as noted above they are black/grey.

[i-leonardo.livejournal.com]

unless the city tackles restaurant waste, giving homeowners new bins isn't going to help much. a couple of the restaurants in magoun square are deeply weak about securing their waste.

[thetathx1138.livejournal.com]

I live there and haven't noticed much of a problem, unless you're talking about how they have to leave stuff on the curb in the early morning. Then, yeah, that's a problem.

[ron_newman]

I haven't seen rats, but they seem to be a big problem all over the city. Check out this article and especially the comments under it:

http://www.thesomervilletimes.com/archives/38951

[theodosia.livejournal.com]

I saw a rat on my street this year, which is the first in over ten years. Given that there has to be a lot of rats before you actually see one, that's a significant data point.

We did have a short-lived mice problem in the house this summer/fall. Short-lived, literally, because cats.

[dawn quirk (from livejournal.com)]

Rats are increasing because of warmer winters. They are healthier. Boston Harbor Islands are overflowing with rats and there is an extremely limited amount of human trash there. Trash barrels won't stop the problem- just another excuse for the city to over-manage and penalize citizens so we don't notice all the skkaaa-sketchy things their friends do.