Now that Portland’s social engineers have cut in half the number of times our garbage is picked up, charged us more for it and made us scrape our plates into our government slop bucket, they finally want the answer to these questions:
Was this a good idea? What’s in the slop bucket?
And now we get to pay more to find out.
An alert 5th Listener has pointed me to this request for proposal from the City of Portland to do a study on our slop buckets.
You might ask yourself right now: didn’t they know what they were doing before they started getting involved in our food scraps? C’mon, dupe! This is the City of Portland for cryin’ out loud, where good intentions are all that really matter–never mind the cost to the taxpayers what the idiots want or if it works.
Let’s just back the truck up here for a second and discover how we got here.
The City of Portland says it’s been talking about this program and planning it since 2007. I have no doubt that some group of citizens from some agitation group funded by some foundation probably has been talking about this since 2007. That doesn’t make the program thoroughly vetted, however.
Obviously. Because if it had been would we now have to pay someone to find out what’s in our slop buckets after they said they KNEW what was in our slop buckets?
First the city claims that about 30% -70% of our garbage is food scraps. Mine sure isn’t. I’ve challenged Mayor Sam Adams on this statistic but he just talks louder and won’t tolerate legitimate questions. I take this to mean that Sam’s just making it up again like he did “facts” on his plastic bag ban.
Looking at the City website on the matter shows social engineers believe 75% of our garbage could be recycled in some way. Maybe that’s what the Mayor meant. Considering their fuzzy math in the past, I don’t take this as truth either.
The City claims that its pilot program was a smashing success. That’s not true. Mayor Adams claims that 87% of the participants were gobsmacked–absolutely delighted!– by the slop bucket plan. That’s the way he touted it in the media.
That sounds like a lot, huh? Except that fewer than 20% of the participants responded to the government survey and the government survey provided mostly answers that only allowed gradations of “satisfaction” with the program.
Of the 2000 people “participating” in the pilot program, 391 turned in their government garbage/slop bucket survey. Even the “politifact” reporter said the gradations of satisfaction tilted toward the positive (here). I wrote about the poll here.
It looks like this food scrap plan was meant to satisfy the “aspirational”** nothing-to-see-here-it-means-nothing 2009 Climate Action Plan. That’s the same document that brought us the “plastic” bag ban. Don’t bother looking at it, this plan isn’t in it.
Here’s the claim, however:
Approximately one ton of carbon dioxide emissions is prevented for each ton of food scraps diverted from landfill. A fully implemented residential program (assuming food scrap capture rate of 75 percent) could prevent the release of almost 22,000 tons of CO2 each year.
Of course what they don’t say is that CO2 isn’t a driver of “man made global warming” AND if you further read about the ‘greenhouse’ effect, METHANE gas is a more serious consideration than CO2. What’s the by-product of rotting food scraps and garbage? Methane.
Portland: Where so called leaders who tell us how to live instead of accommodating the customers.
**
(This dismissive ‘aspirational’ feint was used by the newspaper of record to dismiss the huge role the County wants to take in food delivery in the Multnomah Food Action Plan (here). A blogger, tipped off my reporting on the food plan here, here, here, here,) was politifacted on one of her assertions when the Politi”fact” reporter airily dismissed the plan as ‘aspirational.’ )
