I lived in Dedham most of my life, where I liked to say my family was new to town. After all, we had been there only since the Potato Famine. This past summer my family and I moved to Needham and now really are new to town. I’m suddenly the guy with questions about the idiosyncrasies of this place we’re beginning to call home instead of the one who could answer questions like why the neighborhood elementary school was built with the front door in the back.
As we unpacked and tried to stay afloat in a sea of cardboard boxes, an immediate question came to mind: Why doesn’t Needham have curbside trash pickup? And, as a close second: Why do Needhamites love the dump so much?
The bin stops here
Dedham has curbside trash pickup funded by taxes. For the most part, it has worked well. When I was a kid, anything on the curb got picked up. About 15 years ago, a new contract meant everything had to fit into a bin the vendor provided. There was a transfer station for the occasional bulky items, but even after the transfer station closed in 2019, the curbside bins almost always had plenty of space for my family of four. Dedhamites do have to call an outside service for big items like mattresses, but those are rare occurrences.
Despite the reduced service, the price was right. The Town of Dedham pays Boston Carting Services $3,224,000 to pick up the trash at roughly 8,600 households. That works out to about $30 per house per month.
I would have exactly zero desire to transport trash even if I didn’t drive a small, trunkless car, so we now pay $40 a month for private trash hauling. With the way property taxes work, I wasn’t paying exactly $30 a month previously, but psychologically it still stings to pay for pickup.
I discovered I am not alone in wishing a well-resourced town like Needham would provide curbside trash pickup. The 2024 National Community Survey shows high scores for all other utilities in Needham, such as water, gas and internet access, but not for garbage collection. Only four in 10 residents indicated trash service in town is good or excellent — much lower than the national average.
On the other hand, the service my family gets from our private hauler is better than we got in Dedham. In the few weeks we have had trash pickup here, I have regularly left out broken down boxes, and they have always been taken. Drivers don’t even get out of trash trucks in Dedham, so those would have been left to blow in the wind. This is an example of competition among providers producing a better service for consumers.
More is not always better
Having multiple companies picking up trash, however, means we also have the rumble of trucks several times a week competing for space with parked cars, bikes, and most importantly kids playing outside. Those trucks, each of which weighs 25 tons or more, emit considerably more exhaust than a single truck would.
Among longtime residents particularly, I am told one of the primary objections to curbside pickup has been the unsightliness of the barrels. Today’s trash toters are not the metal cans of the 1970s, though. The plastic barrels currently used are as attractive as such a receptacle could be. And ugly or not, they are now a daily — not weekly — reality in Needham.
A dump skeptic is nearly convinced
I must admit I was astonished by the Recycling and Transfer Station, and not just because of the VIP tour I got from Superintendent Matthew DeMarrais and Assistant Superintendent Justin MacGregor of Recycling and Solid Waste. I don’t imagine I will ever develop the fondness for it that many residents seem to have, but the level of service provided there far and away exceeds anything we had in Dedham.
It was clear from the hub of activity at the RTS that Select Board Chair Kevin Keane was being facetious when he told me the lack of curbside pickup was because Needhamites don’t produce any trash. There is a lot going on at the RTS, including certain services that already would have been very helpful to me in my short time living here. Color me impressed — I’ll be going back.
During my visit I even met town celebrity Jeff Dinneen, founder of Cans for Calcium. This chance meeting with Jeff — who was dropping off trash and not picking up bottles — was a great example of the primary reason I hear people like the RTS so much: serendipitous meetings with neighbors. I never quite thought of a dump as a cure to the loneliness epidemic in this country, yet it seems to have a way of building community.
In my brief foray into the history and inner workings of Needham’s trash collection, I heard longtime residents speak of the RTS in almost reverential tones: “We love it and how dare anyone speak poorly of it?” Newer Needhamites, on the other hand, spend more than $1 million to buy a starter home and can’t believe their tax bills don’t include a service that is considered pretty standard in the communities whence they came — and I tend to agree with them.
The bottom line is the bottom line
I don’t like paying taxes any more than the next guy but, if we have to pay them, I am a big fan of Pigouvian taxes. By charging people to throw away trash, but not for recycling or green waste, it encourages us to be more selective about what ends up in landfills. Those yellow bags, or more specifically the price tags attached to them, benefit us all. We should charge more for things that have negative externalities, and charge less for socially beneficial products and services.
When residents sort their recycling, towns can sell it for a profit. With a single stream recycling system, as we had in Dedham and which my private hauler offers, it costs money to pay someone else to do the sorting — a price I am very willing to pay.
I’m not a numbers guy, but it seems that if each household put in what I pay now for private service, the entire town could get uniform trash barrels, a single day a week to hear and smell the trucks, and a fraction of the pollution being spewed into our atmosphere and lungs — and still preserve the services offered at the RTS. That seems like a pretty good deal to me.
In the coming weeks, the town will conduct a long-awaited survey on trash service. I’m looking forward to weighing in and seeing the results. While I wait, I’ll continue to explore the unique things that make this town tick.
Needham resident Brian Keaney is a nonfiction ghostwriter and has written under his own name for the Dedham Times and The Boston Globe
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