Step away from the trash can...

The rail subcommittee of WMATA's Riders Advisory Council has made the recycling of newspapers one of its top priorities. There are already recycling bins placed in the unpaid area of every station. However, many riders don't use them. Instead, they toss their newspapers into the garbage cans. And there are plenty of newspapers to toss, with the recent advent of free newspapers like Express and the Examiner, which are liberally handed out at the stations where commuters begin their trips in the morning.

Irked by the environmental unfriendliness of this discarded newsprint, the RAC rail subcommittee has been talking to Metro staff about the issue and at a June 14 meeting of the committee staff explained some of the issues at hand. Lt. George Burns is the counterterrorism coordinator for the Metro transit police. He says that 2004 directives from the Transportation Security Administration required that rail stations have either blastproof trash cans or lightweight clear plastic trash cans. Metro staff ruled out the clear plastic cans because they would be tossed onto the track by vandals, so staff sought out blast-proof cans instead.

Nothing about blast-proof trash cans is simple. They were placed on the platforms only after staff performed assessments of the "blast mitigation properties" of various areas of the platform. (Have any of you noticed a pattern as to where the cans are placed on the platforms?) Only bomb-proof cans are in the paid area, so the recycling bins, whiich are not bomb-proof, are banished to the unpaid area of stations.

Metro apparently has been a leader in bomb-proof trash can technology: already the agency has spent $800,000 on bomb-proof cans, and staffers say it's the first transit agency to have bomb-proof cans on station platforms. Even so, the agency might get more cans: at Metro Center during the morning rush hour, the trash cans fill up every fifteen minutes, mostly with Express newspapers. Custodians must lift these heavy sacks of trash, so they would like some more trash cans to help ease the load.

Of course it's the Expresses in the trash cans that irk the committee, so they asked Lt. Burns about labeling the cans more clearly. Why not put a big sign on the trash can saying it's only for trash, while directing riders to the newspaper bins? For some reason I don't understand, Burns did not like this idea, which led to some heated discussions between he and members of the committee, who couldn't understand what was so hard about putting some labels on the trash cans.

Perhaps the best idea would be some bomb-proof newspaper cans on the platforms. But those would likely cost $4000 each.

I say: get the Washington Post to pay for more trash cans. It's their Express newspapers that are filling them. The newspapers may be free for riders, but they're costing Metro money. But of course the Post has no good reason to pay for the cans, so why would they...but their brand does appear on the recycle bins. Perhaps they help pay for recycling? Metro says it does not receive revenue for the newsprint it brings in.

At a future meeting the rail subcommittee likely will have a Metro staffer discuss a peeve of many riders: elevator and escalator reliability.