Concord residents frustrated over pay-as-you-throw program’s purple trash bag mandate
Published: 01-15-2025 4:32 PM |
Every week, Concord’s purple trash bags are placed at the end of driveways, with varied opinions of the residents who place them there.
For some, the cost is difficult to stomach. And for others, it feels like a tax on those with a disability who may generate more trash.
But for those in the opposite camp, the bags help divert would-be waste to recycling bins, the cost forcing residents to think about what they’re throwing away.
Overall in Concord, the pay-as-you-throw program and its iconic purple trash bags have become a fact of life regardless of how residents feel about them.
Jenny Williams has a household of five and spends about $90 a month on the required trash bags.
She recycles as much as she can, but the expenses keep climbing, and it’s not always straightforward — like figuring out that the greasy part of pizza boxes can’t go in the recycling.
To save money, she sometimes holds onto her trash bags for a week or two, trying to fill them as much as possible before putting them out on trash pickup day.
“It gets really smelly during summer,” Williams said, explaining that she has no choice but to keep the trash at home to cut costs. “What’s more important – making sure everybody can eat or keep the house over their head, or buying purple trash bags?”
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A 30-gallon purple trash $3.20 and a 15-gallon is $1.60. In comparison, a standard 30-gallon bag costs less than 25 cents. The price of the bags started at $1 for the small bag and $2 for the large bag.
Chip Chesley, the city’s General Services director explained that the price increase wasn’t just about encouraging recycling — it was about covering rising costs.
Since Concord rolled out the pay-as-you-throw program in 2009, the city’s solid waste has dropped dramatically. In the first year, tonnage fell by 44%, from 14,722 tons to 8,311 tons. However, in recent years, recycling has taken a dip, now hovering around 2,500 tons annually, while trash has stabilized at about 5,200 tons.
“There is a very close relationship between when people have to pay for something and when they don’t have to pay for something,” said Chesley. “It modifies your behavior.”
The recent numbers may indicate a growing awareness of waste, though it’s unclear whether the purple bags are driving this shift or if it’s part of a broader trend.
If Concord were to do away with the program, Chesley said it would likely see a rise in trash, potentially 3,600 more tons each year with each ton costing $94 to dispose of. That would mean an extra $338,400 in waste disposal costs annually.
The city has an agreement with Casella Waste Systems, a waste management company, that trash will only be collected from the curb if placed in the designated purple bag. However, these purple bags are not biodegradable.
The price of the purple bags is only to offset disposal costs, not collection costs.
In a social media call-out by the Monitor asking Concord residents for their thoughts on the purple bags, most responses were negative.
“I hate them! Purple trash bags are like freaking gold! They’re so expensive,” Molly McKenna said, exasperated by the city’s requirement to use them. “They rip so easily and so we grab a regular trash bag, double-bag it, and then put the black trash bag inside the purple one. I can’t in good conscious double bag with a purple trash bag.”
But not everyone feels that way.
Judith Kurtz, a city councilor who also sits on the solid waste advisory committee, said she hasn’t heard much feedback about the purple trash bags – aside from a few complaints that they’re a hassle to use and rip too easily.
“They’re designed to hold a certain amount on purpose and if you’re trying to overfill them, then, yes, they will tear,” explained Kurtz. “It’s not that they are poorly made. It’s that they are made for a certain capacity and when we push the boundaries of that capacity, then that’s when there’s an issue.”
A bag comparison test conducted by the Monitor found that the purple bags stack up quite well against name-brand alternatives. In fact, some tests even showed the purple bags performing better than the typical store-bought options.
Joyce Senior, a 65-year-old resident of three years doesn’t have any complaints about the quality of the trash bags. But she does find the cost to be a bit much — especially for people like her who have disabilities or parents with babies.
She uses products for incontinence, which means she puts out two trash bags every week. Before developing the condition last summer, she only put out one.
“I just feel like it’s almost a tax on being disabled,” she said. “You have no control over that. There’s nothing you can do to fix your problem, you can’t change it. It’s an expense that you just don’t need. You already have the expense of the disability and all the things that come with that.”
Most Concord residents support recycling, but some feel the city’s purple trash bags are doing more harm to their wallets than good for the environment like the double-bagging that adds to the plastic waste.
They say the only thing that’s gone up since the bags were introduced is their expenses — not recycling rates.
In emails and calls to the Monitor, many residents said they’d rather use their own bags with a permit sticker or, like many other towns, purchase a yearly dump sticker to take their trash directly to the transfer station.
Still, others have reduced their waste enough they have difficulty filling the bags in the first place.
Reagan Bissonnette, a Concord resident with a family of three, said she doesn’t take her trash out more than once a month.
“It takes us a while to fill it up because when you take out everything you can recycle, when you take out your food waste, then really, most of what we’re putting into those bags are types of plastic that aren’t readily recyclable through our Concord system,” explained Bissonnette.
When asked about the cost of the bags, Bissonnette said, “It is that financial cost that gets to hopefully think twice about what they’re throwing away.”
Bissonnette, who serves on the city’s solid waste advisory committee and is the executive director of the Northeast Resource Recovery Association, acknowledged hearing complaints about bag quality from other communities.
“But here in Concord, where I live, we’ve never had an issue with the quality of the purple bags,” she said.
Joshua Crawford, a Boscawen resident who manages apartment complexes on Fisherville Road and in the Heights neighborhood, claimed that residents who don’t live in the complex at times dump their trash in the dumpsters there.
As a result, apartment dumpsters overflow, leading to trash piling up around them.
To fix the problem, Crawford said, he has to either request more dumpsters or ask for more frequent pickups, costs which ultimately fall on renters.
“You might look at it and say ‘Hey they live in an apartment complex. They don’t pay for purple bags,’” said Crawford. “But they’re still paying for the trash service and maybe they have to pay more because of other people who aren’t paying anything.”
Crawford wants to ask the police for help, but he said that for officers to take action, he would need to press charges for theft of services — a step he’s reluctant to take.
“The last thing I want to do is send a single mom, who is struggling to get by already by not being able to afford purple bags a court date or an arrest for something like trash,” he said. “The idea behind the purple bags is to encourage recycling and to help the environment, but it’s almost to a point where it’s backfiring because now it’s hurting the community a little more by people trying to skirt around the rules.”