Santa Cruz, CA - Waste Age:
Crunch Time
November 1, 2006 12:00 PM
Officials in Santa Cruz, California, are proud of their vibrant downtown district. Lined with movie theaters, restaurants and shops, the area is a magnet for pedestrians — and for trash. In a few key areas, municipal trash cans were filling faster than sanitation crews could empty them. Even after adding a night crew to perform a second pickup each day, cans still regularly overflowed.
"What we found was a lot of times it is just pizza boxes or cups that aren't compressed and take up a lot of space," says Santa Cruz Director of Public Works Mark Dettle. "[The cans] fill up and then people start stacking a lot of stuff around them. It just creates a mess." The...