Flow Control:
A Trash Tug of War
Garbage is usually seen as an unpleasant fact of life that must be placed out of sight and out of mind. But to governments and businesses alike, solid waste is just another commodity — one that can make towns and companies quite wealthy if they corner the market.
For decades, there has been a raging debate, known as “flow control,” over the issue of who should be allowed to “own” solid waste as it is transported to landfills and recycling facilities.
To city and county governments, disposal of solid waste is one of the top public sanitation and health issues, so many of them view waste management as their ultimate responsibility. Therefore, some enact flow control ordinances stipulating that all solid waste generated within the municipality must go to their own transfer facilities, regardless of which private or public companies collect the refuse. In essence, flow control is a legal monopoly over solid waste, since governments can set their prices to dispose of the refuse in their own municipal landfills, known as a tipping fee.
However, private companies have objected to flow control on the grounds that solid waste is a valuable commodity. By forcing their collection vehicles to send waste to specific municipal landfills, these ordinances, private haulers argue, violate the rights of garbage firms under the Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution. These haulers, they say, should be able to send their “commodity” to any other legal facility with the lowest tipping fees, even if the landfills are out of state.
The U.S. Supreme Court has weighed in several times, siding with the private haulers in 1994 but later affirming that municipalities have a special duty to ensure that waste is managed properly via flow control, as long as bids for collection contracts are open and non-discriminatory. We surely have not seen the last of this ongoing trash talk. Stay tuned.
Photo: Randy Woods